Ktunaxan

Ktunaxan, also called Kutenai, is the language of the Ktunaxa people, whose bands live along the Kootenay River and around the upper Columbia in the Rocky Mountain region. It is usually treated as a language isolate: attempts to link it to the Salishan languages of neighbouring Plateau peoples, or to wider Macro-Algonquian groupings, have not won acceptance.

The language is agglutinative, marking much of its grammar with prefixes and suffixes on the verb. Beside the spoken language, the Ktunaxa also used a signed form for communication between peoples.

The Ktunaxa language had no writing system of its own, and the Ktunaxa first enter written records around 1793, on a map by the fur-trader Alexander Mackenzie; by the 1830s some bands were blending Christian elements, learned through Iroquois intermediaries, into their ceremonies.