Kathlamet was a Chinookan language that was spoken around the border of Washington and Oregon by the Kathlamet people. The most extensive records of the language were made by Franz Boas, and a grammar was documented in the dissertation of Dell Hymes.[2] It became extinct in the 1930s and there is little text left of it.
Kathlamet was spoken in northwestern Oregon along the south bank of the lower Columbia River. It has been classified as a dialect of Upper Chinook, or as Lower Chinook, but was mutually intelligible with neither.
. . . Kathlamet language . . .
All of the Chinookan languages feature what Mithun (1999) describes as “rich consonant inventor(y) typical of [languages native to] the Northwest coast” and “elaborate phonological processes”.
Boas (1911b) reports that Kathlamet consonant clusters are defined by their position to the word initial, medial and final and the phonemic syllable initial and final. In sequences of consonant where a continuant occurs as nucleus, consonants following the nucleus are taken to appear the separate clusters, the nucleus in none.
. . . Kathlamet language . . .