Coast Tsimshian is spoken along the British
Columbia coast adjacent to the border with Alaska. The
system presented here is primarily based on Mulder's
(1988) interpretation of Dunn's grammar and dictionary.
Voiced and voiceless plosives are largely in complementary
distribution, voiced ones occurring immediately before a
voiced sonorant or vowel and voiceless ones in final
position and in clusters elsewhere. However, exceptions to
this pattern occur often enough that obstruent voicing
must be treated as contrastive. It is not clear if plain
velar stops are distinctive; Dunn implies that either a
w-offglide or a j-offglide accompanies every velar stop
but many examples are written without an offglide. Mulder
interprets occurrence of "plain velars before rounded
vowels" as evidence for three velar series, but it could
be that consonant rounding is redundant in this context
and these are instances of labialized velars. Both Mulder
and Dunn recognise a larger inventory of vowels than Hoard
(1978) does for closely-related Gitksan. Phonetic vowel
quality seems strongly influenced by consonant environment
and stress, but full details are not worked out. Only
three vowels, which occur long and short, are assumed to
be underlying.

Dunn, J.A. 1978. A Practical Dictionary of the Coast
Tsimshian Language. National Museum of Man Mercury Series,
Canadian Ethnology Service Paper no. 42.

Dunn, J.A. 1979. A Reference Grammar for the Coast
Tsimshian Language. Canadian Ethnology Service.

Hoard, J.E. 1978. Obstruent voicing in Gitksan: some
implications for distinctive feature theory. Linguistic
Studies of Native Canada (eds. Eung-Do Cook and J. Kaye).
University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver.

Mulder, J.G. 1988. Ergativity in Coast Tsimshian
(Sm'algyax). PhD Dissertation, UCLA.