Miluk
Lower Coquille
miluk tɬiis
Pronunciation	[míluk]
Native to	United States
Region	Oregon
Ethnicity	Miluk people
Extinct	1939, with the death ofAnnie Miner Peterson
Revival	[1]
Language family	Coosan Miluk
Language codes
ISO 639-3	iml
Linguist List	iml
Glottolog	milu1241
Map of Coosan languages

Miluk, also known asLower Coquille from its location, is one of twoCoosan languages. It shares more than half of its vocabulary withHanis, though these are not always obvious, and grammatical differences cause the two languages to look quite different. Miluk started being displaced byAthabaskan in the late 18th century, and many Miluk shifted to Athabaskan and Hanis.

Miluk was spoken around the lowerCoquille River and the South Slough ofCoos Bay. The namemíluk is the endonym, derived from a village name. The last fully fluent speaker of Miluk wasAnnie Miner Peterson, who died in 1939. She knew both Miluk and Hanis, and made a number of recordings.^[2][3] Laura Hodgkiss Metcalf, who died in 1961, was the last functional speaker (her mother was Miluk), and was an informant toMorris Swadesh for his Penutian Vocabulary Survey.

The consonant inventory of Miluk can be tabulated as follows, based on Douglas-Tavani (2024):^[4]

• /ɣ/ may also range to uvular[ʁ] infree variation.
• /m,n,l/ are also heard as geminated [mː,nː,lː].Gemination may bephonemic in Miluk, but Jacobs (1939 & 1940) transcribed few instances of these geminate sonorants. Some words transcribed with [mː,nː,lː] in the data are also transcribed at other times with [m,n,l], while some words are transcribed consistently as geminated and never as their shorter counterparts. Due to this ambiguity, the geminate sonorants are listed here asallophonic.

• /ɛ/ is pronounced between [æ] and [ɛ], but it tends towards the latter.^[4][5]
• /a/ is pronounced somewhere between [a] and [ɑ], likely often pronounced centrally as [ä].^[4][5]
• /u/ is sometimes articulated as [oː] or [oʊ], though these appear in free variation with [u].^[4]
• /i/ and /ɪ/ have a proven minimal pair (wii= 'thus' &wi 'who') and are therefore distinct phonemes,^[4] despite Jacobs originally considering them as two allophones of one phoneme.^[5][6]
• /u/ and /ʊ/ have no exact minimal pair but do have minimal environments. In general, words are consistently pronounced with /u/ and /ʊ/ without variation,^[4][5][6] and this lack of a minimal pair can therefore be most plausibly described as a result of documentation gaps.^[4] Therefore, they are listed here as separate phonemes.

Vowel harmony occurs in Miluk, although sporadic.^[4][7] The most common occurrence of vowel harmony in Miluk is the harmonization of/ɛ/ in roots with/ɑ/ in suffixes.^[7]

Miluk verbs have a tendency to be clause-initial.^[4][7]Arguments that are expressed with overt noun phrases usually follow the verb, while pronominal arguments expressed are encoded inclitics that attach to the verb.^[4][7]Absolutive and ergative arguments can be interchangeable.^[4][7]

The following example shows the ergative argument before the absolutive argument.

However, in the next example, the absolutive argument precedes the ergative argument.

Miluk often uses apresentational construction when telling stories or recounting an event to bring attention to the subject of the story.^[7] As a result of this, the affected noun phrase is fronted in the sentence and often appears clause-initially. The following examples are of the presentational construction, with the presented construction bolded.

In Miluk, the possessive noun phrase precedes what is possessed. The possessed noun takes no article but instead is marked with the oblique [tə].

There are two articles in Miluk, kʷə and ʎə. ʎə is used with nouns that are closer to the speaker, while kʷə is used for nouns which are more distant. These articles do not reflect a gender of a noun and both articles have been found in use for the same noun in discourse.^[7]Verbs have intransitive, imperfect, and perfect marker. Verbs which are intransitive take the -u suffix, while the imperfect tense takes the -ʔi suffix and the perfect tense takes the -t suffix.^[7]

Miluk has anergative–absolutive distinction, expressedmorphologically;^[7] the suffix-x denotes the ergative case in Miluk, and the absolutive case is unmarked.

In the following examples, the ergative argument comes before the absolutive argument.

Miluk allows for the opposite to occur, as we see the absolutive argument precede the ergative argument.

Miluk does not have a masculine/feminine gender distinction, but it does have reflexives of an old gender system. The language reflects this old system in two instances: with a suffix that follows articles (-č) and in lexical items for male and female people throughout life.^[7] The suffix -č has been seen to be optional but occurs in three instances:

1. following a feminine noun,
2. referring to a young person, and (the most common)
3. referring to elders.^[7]

The second place where Miluk holds on to an older gender system is when referring to males or females. Words for males often begin with /t/, while the female words often begin with /hu/ and /w/.^[7]

Miluk has no marked third person clitic on verbs.^[4][7] This is flouted as presentational fronting occurs whenever a new argument is introduced, which are the sentences most likely to have two third-person arguments, and sentences uttered after this argument has been introduced that have two third-person arguments will only express the defocused one through an overt noun phrase, while the other is understood through context within the discourse rather than through a co-indexed clitic.^[4][7]

Miluk has an inclusive and exclusive distinction when it comes to the dual possessive. In the first person dual inclusive, the words receive the circumfix s=nə-, while the first person dual exclusive receives the prefix nə-.^[7]

There are two morphemes which can be added to a verb to mark tense. The morphemehan indicates the prospective tense, which describes that an event is going to occur.^[7] The other morpheme that can be added to a verb ishanƛ, which marks the future tense. The future tense is distinguished from the prospective tense and has appeared irrealis marker a ̆x. The order in which the morphemes appear are the pronominal clitics, followed by mood, tense and then aspect.^[7]

In the following examples, "han" indicates that an event is going to occur.^[7]

The morpheme tə marks an oblique or possessive, which occurs throughout the Salish language family. The following two example reveals -tə acting as the oblique marker.

The Miluk language is now extinct. The last speakers were two sisters, Lolly Hotchkiss and Daisy Wasson Codding. The two worked with a linguist in 1953 to record words from the language but the two were not fluent in adulthood, and had trouble remembering words.^[2] The last native speaker was Annie Miner Peterson, who knew both Miluk andHanis.^[2] Annie Peterson's first language was Miluk, and in 1930, Annie Miner Peterson began working with Melville Jacobs and the two produced two volumes of texts in both dialects of Coos.^[2]Coos Narrative and Ethnographic Texts andCoos Myth Texts were the two publications were published, but the two publications did not have any linguistic analysis. The books only provided English translations to the texts.^[7]

• Wurm, Mühlhäusler, & Tryon, 1996.Atlas of languages of intercultural communication in the Pacific, Asia and the Americas, p. 1148.

• Jacobs, Melville. (1939).Coos narrative and ethnologic texts. University of Washington publications in anthropology (Vol. 8, No. 1). Seattle, WA: University of Washington.
• Jacobs, Melville. (1940).Coos myth texts. University of Washington publications in anthropology (Vol. 8, No. 2). Seattle, WA: University of Washington.
• Anderson, Troy. (1990).Miluk Dictionary. Stanford Library. Green Library Stacks. PM961 .A53 1990

• Douglas-Tavani, Jordan (2024).A Reference Grammar of miluk tɬiis tɬə miluk tɬiis buuqw (Doctor). Santa Barbara: University of California.

• Whereat, Patty (June 2001)."The Milluk Language - Ghaala"(PDF). Archived fromthe original(PDF) on April 7, 2014. RetrievedMarch 26, 2018.
• "Shichils's Blog - Fun with Hanis (and a little Milluk & Siuslaw too)". Retrieved2014-04-05.
• "Tsunami Story - Milluk".Coquille Indian Tribe. Retrieved2014-04-06.
• Douglas-Tavani, Jordan A. G (June 2024).A Reference Grammar of miluk tɬiis tɬə miluk tɬiis buuqw (Thesis). University of California, Santa Barbara.

• Coosan languages
• Languages extinct in the 20th century
• 20th-century disestablishments in Oregon

• Articles containing Miluk-language text
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• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Pages with plain IPA
• Language articles with Linglist code
• Language articles with unreferenced extinction date
• Articles with ambiguous glossing abbreviations
• Pages with interlinear glosses using more than three unnamed parameters