all post-velar (pre-uvular) whereas the approximants are either pharyngeal or true uvulars. Vowels St'at'imcets has 8 vowels: The phonetic realization of the phonemes are indicated in brackets to the right. All retracted vowels are indicated by a line under the vowel. These retracted vowels alternate morphophonemically. (Note that St'at'imcets also has retracted consonants.) The non-retracted vowel /a/ ranges from . Because retracted and non-retracted can both pronounced , there is often phonetic overlap. Phonological processes epenthetic . Post-velar Harmony (retraction): Within roots, there is a restriction that all consonant and vowel retracted-nonretracted pairs must be of the same type. That is, a root may not contain both a retracted and a nonretracted vowel or consonant. This is a type of Retracted Tongue Root harmony (also called pharyngeal harmony) involving both vowels and consonants that is an areal feature of this region of North America, shared by other Interior Salishan and non-Salishan languages (for example see Chilcotin vowel flattening). In addition to the root harmony restriction, some suffixes harmonize with the root to which they are attached. For instance, the inchoative suffix -wil’c: {| class="IPA wikitable" |- | ama "good" | /ʔáma/ | + /-ɣʷélʼx/ | → | | amawíl’c "to get better" |- | "bad" | | + | → | | qvḻwíiḻʼc "to get spoiled" |} Orthography There are two orthographies, one based on Americanist Phonetic Notation that was developed by the Mount Currie School and used by the Lillooet Council, and a modification by Bouchard that is used by the Upper St̓át̓imc Language, Culture and Education Society. The latter orthography is unusual in that is written . Grammar St'at'imcets has two main types of words: full words variable words invariable words clitics proclitics enclitics The variable word type may be affected by many morphological processes, such as prefixation, suffixation, infixation, reduplication, and glottalization. St̓át̓imcets, like the other Salishan languages, exhibits predicate/argument flexibility. All full words are able to occur in the predicate (including words with typically 'nouny' meanings such as nk̓yap 'coyote', which in the predicate essentially means 'to be a coyote') and any full word is able to appear in an argument, even those that seem "verby", such as t̓ak 'go along', which as a noun, is equivalent the noun phrase 'one that goes along'. Reduplication St̓át̓imcets, as is typical of the Salishan family, has several types of reduplication (and triplication) that have a range of functions