Syllabic consonant in the context of "Vowel space"

A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, loudness, and length. They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress. The nucleus, or "center", of a syllable typically consists of a vowel sound (though this is not always the case).

The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). In English, the word vowel is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them: ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩, and sometimes ⟨y⟩, and ⟨w⟩.

The Salishan languages (/ˈseɪlɪʃən/ SAY-lish-ən), also known as the Salish languages (/ˈseɪlɪʃ/ SAY-lish), are a family of languages found in the Pacific Northwest in North America, namely the Canadian province of British Columbia and the American states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. They are characterised by agglutinativity and syllabic consonants. For instance the Nuxalk word clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts’ (IPA: [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]), meaning 'he had had [in his possession] a bunchberry plant', has twelve obstruent consonants in a row with no phonetic or phonemic vowels.

The Salishan languages are a geographically contiguous block, with the exception of the Nuxalk (Bella Coola), in the Central Coast of British Columbia, and the extinct Tillamook language, to the south on the central coast of Oregon.