a family of Native American languages including Coeur d'Alêne, Kalispel, and other languages of British Columbia and the northwestern U.S
adjective
2.
of, pertaining to, or characteristic of this language family or its speakers
Word origin
[1885–90; salish + -an]This word is first recorded in the period 1885–90. Other words that entered Englishat around the same time include: booster, sensitization, toner, upsweep, zoom-an is a suffix occurring originally in adjectives borrowed from Latin, formed from nounsdenoting places (Roman; urban) or persons (Augustan), and now productively forming English adjectives by extension of the Latin pattern.Attached to geographical names, it denotes provenance or membership (American; Chicagoan), the latter sense now extended to membership in social classes, religious denominations,etc., in adjectives formed from various kinds of noun bases (Episcopalian; pedestrian; Puritan; Republican) and membership in zoological taxa (acanthocephalan; crustacean). Attached to personal names, it has the additional senses “contemporary with” (Elizabethan; Jacobean) or “proponent of” (Hegelian; Freudian) the person specified by the noun base. It also occurs in a set of personal nouns,mainly loanwords from French, denoting one who engages in, practices, or works withthe referent of the base noun (comedian; grammarian; historian; theologian)