Saanich has no rounded vowels in native vocabulary. As in many languages, vowels are strongly affected by post-velar consonants.
Front
Central
Back
High
Mid
Low
The rounded close high back vowel is found only in loanwords, such as CEPU "coat", from French. is adjacent to a post-velar or labio-postvelar consonant, or preceding. is —rarely as low as —adjacent to a post-velar or labio-postvelar consonant or preceding. It is closer—almost —next to a lateral, post-alveolar, or. is before. It is also affected by post-velars and. is generally mid central, but becomes adjacent to a postvelar or labio-postvelar, or a laryngeal obstruent, and especially between two such consonants, whether or not it is stressed. When unstressed, it is a close central following post-alveolars and before sonorants, and it is central rounded before the labialized obstruents.
Consonants
The following table includes all the sounds found in the North Straits dialects. No one dialect includes them all. Plosives are not aspirated, but are not voiced either. Ejectives have weak glottalization. The unrounded prevelar stop is found only in loanwords, as in CEPU above. The dentals are often written,, but this is inaccurate, as they are laminal sibilants,, and are only rarely interdental. The alveolars, on the other hand, are apical, as are all alveolars, including the laterals. The post-velars are often written,, etc., but are not actually uvular. The phonemic status of the glottalized sonorants is not agreed upon. Some linguists analyse them as unit phonemes, others as sequences of a plain sonorant and a glottal stop. They do not occur in word-initial position. They tend to following a stressed vowel, preceding a stressed vowel, and creaky voiced sonorants elsewhere.
Stress
Saanich stress is phonemic. Each full word has one stressed syllable, either in the root or in a suffix, the position of which is lexically determined. "Secondary stress" is sometimes described, but this is merely a way of distinguishing lexical schwas from epenthetic schwas.
Writing system
The Saanich orthography was created by Dave Elliott in 1978. It uses only uppercase letters; making it a unicase alphabet, with one exception: the letter s, which marks the third personpossessive suffix. The glottal stop is not always indicated, but may be written with a comma: ,. Plain and glottalized resonants are not distinguished. The vowel is usually written Á, unless it occurs next to a post-velar consonant, where it is written A.
In Saanich, metathesis is used as a grammatical device to indicate "actual" aspect. The actual aspect is most often translated into English as a be …-ing progressive. The actual aspect is derived from the "nonactual" verb form by a CV → VC metathesis process.
