Source Texts
Text
In Nuxalk, an Indigenous language from the Pacific Northwest region of what are now the United States and Canada, wats' means "a dog," whereas wawats'ii means "a small or cute dog." This phenomenon, in which an element of a root word is repeated, sometimes with modification, within another word that is related to the root word, is called reduplication. In this case, the element "wa" in wats' gets repeated in wawats'ii. There are many examples of this type of reduplication in Nuxalk.