Salishn.
/ˈseɪlɪʃ/, U.S. /ˈseɪlɪʃ/ 1.
a. Formerly, an American Indian people of north-western Montana, also called the Flat-heads (see flat-head n. 1); now used to designate a group of American peoples, including the Flat-heads, inhabiting the north-western United States and south-western Canada.The group is frequently subdivided geographically into Coast(al) Salish and Interior Salish.
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the world > people > ethnicities > North American peoples > peoples of Great Basin and Plateau > [noun]
snake1791
Kutenai1801
Pierced Nose1805
Shoshone1805
Tillamook1806
Wallawalla1806
Nez Perce1811
Ute1826
Paiute1827
Spokane1831
Sahaptin1836
flat-head1837
Shuswap1838
Twana1838
Salish1843
Molale1844
Washoe1846
Yakima1852
Skokomish1854
Klamath1890
1843 W. A. Ferris in Life in Rocky Mts. (1940) xv. 88 They [sc. Flat-head Indians] call themselves in their beautiful tongue, ‘Salish’, and speak a language remarkable for its sweetness and simplicity.
1881 Encycl. Brit. XII. 826/2 Selish or Flat Heads.
1910 F. W. Hodge Handbk. Amer. Indians II. 415/2 Salish... Formerly a large and powerful division of the Salishan family, to which they gave their name, inhabiting much of w. Montana and centering around Flathead lake and valley.
1933 W. Schmidt High Gods in N. Amer. vii. 111 Of the three Amerindian groups whose religions include a High God, the Selish are the most recent.
1978 Amer. Poetry Rev. Sept. 15/3 The organization of the animal kingdom by a lunar divinity occupies a predominant place..in the myths of the Salish of North America.
b. The name of a group of languages spoken by the Salish. (In quot. 1848, the language of the Flat-heads.)
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the mind > language > languages of the world > Amerindian > [noun] > northern Amerindian > Mosan > Salish
Salish1848
Salishan1897
1848 R. G. Latham in Jrnl. Ethnol. Soc. 1 158 The Salish.—This is an anonymous vocabulary from Duponceau's collection... It is evidently closely akin to the Okanagan.
1923 A. L. Kroeber Anthropol. v. 120 Chinook and Coast Salish, indeed, are in contiguity, and one may therefore have taken up the trait in imitation of the other.
1929 E. Sapir in Encycl. Brit. V. 139/1 The following reductions of linguistic stocks which have been proposed may be looked upon as either probable or very possible:..5, Mosan, consisting of Salish, Chimakuan and Wakashan.
1940 M. W. Smith Puyallup-Nisqually 20 Although the language of the Puyallup-Nisqually is classified as Salish, the people themselves used no special language names.
1977 C. F. Voegelin & F. M. Voegelin Classif. & Index World's Langs. 302 The argument for leaving Salish unaffiliated with respect to phylum classification is given by Voegelin and Voegelin (1967).
2. attributive or as adj.
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the world > people > ethnicities > North American peoples > peoples of Great Basin and Plateau > [adjective]
Shoshone1805
Nez Perce1811
Ute1826
Spokane1838
Sahaptin1841
Skokomish1844
Paiute1845
Salish1849
Yakima1855
Kutenai1877
Salishana1886
Shuswap1904
Wallawalla1957
the mind > language > languages of the world > Amerindian > [adjective] > of Mosan languages > Salish
Salish1933
1849 in Executive Documents U.S. House of Representatives (31st Congress, 1st Sess.) (1850) No. 52. 170 The Salisk or Flat Head Indians occupy from Bitter Root river, a fork of the Columbia, all the country that is drained by that stream down to what is called the Hell Gate.
1902 Encycl. Brit. XXV. 373/1 The Shoshone, Shahaptin, and Salish tribes are of middle stature.
1933 L. Bloomfield Lang. 470 Quilleute, Kwakiutl, and Tsimshian..distinguish between visibility and invisibility in demonstrative pronouns; the latter peculiarity appears also in the neighboring Chinook and Salish dialects.
1965 Canad. Jrnl. Linguistics 10 159 Several other Coast Salish languages distinguish by sex of referent in the older generation.
1977 Islander (Victoria, Brit. Columbia) 2 Oct. 14/1 She has in her studio..a Salish loom.
This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1982; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1843