12 thoughts on “Another reason why it should be called “Chinúk-T’səx̣élis Wáwa””

1. Joseph from Oregon on March 11, 2019 at 2:53 pm said:

   It seems local Chinook terms with situational words not recorded in the nineteenth century as part of the jargon could be re-introduced to a limited extent. An example would be, ”pox” for fog, ”tol” for house and ”qoat’ for high tide. Even my favorite term for my pooch, ”ik!u’tk!ut”.

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   • chinookjargon on March 11, 2019 at 9:01 pm said:

     Hi Joseph, some of those could be extremely useful in Chinook Jargon! I’m fond of saying that you can definitely change a language — all you have to do is get people to use your words/phrases.

     On a related note, we could start talking Chinookan itself again. I’ve been gradually absorbing some of the grammar and vocabulary of Lower Chinookan (Natitanuit, we might call it) through my years of research, and I’m thinking of writing out a user-friendly guide to them…

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     • Anthony Grant on March 10, 2022 at 1:33 pm said:

       Please do this, Dave! The world needs a reliable account of Shoalwater Chinook and for that matter Kiksht which incorporates what we’ve got. Some of the material is inaccessible and some is only barely accessible.

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     • chinookjargon on March 10, 2022 at 4:50 pm said:

       Not to pun injudiciously on your name, but Grant money is the key…!

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2. Mikael Parkvall on March 11, 2019 at 3:55 pm said:

   As someone who reads most, but not everything, on this blog, I’ve forgotten what your take on the issue of pre-European birth is.

   The more I myself have learnt about CJ, the more inclined I have become to favour a post-European birth. But since you’re the expert here, I’m open to your arguemnts to the contrary. (I assume everyone agrees that it was the palefaces who introduced the Nootka component, so that wouldn’t be the issue).

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   • chinookjargon on March 11, 2019 at 8:57 pm said:

     The evidence we have is for a post-European beginning of Chinuk Wawa.

     While there are lots of shared words (nearly all of them nouns) among PNW languages attesting to age-old intergroup contacts long before that, I don’t find that they or anything in the ethnographic record suggests an actual shared language before about 1800 AD.

     Nor should there have been much of a need for a lingua franca, aboriginally, due to the great strength of the practice of exogamy. If you didn’t already know enough languages, you usually were related to someone who knew the language you needed interpretation for.

     Just as kin ties among local / ethnic groups conferred rights to natural-resource use in multiple locales, this pattern of exogamy provided you with communicative resources virtually everywhere you were likely to travel.

     So multilingualism in the Pacific Northwest was, by any accounts I’ve encountered, highly stable.

     Such a setting lacked what I understand as a crucial motivating factor in the formation of a new (i.e. pidgin/creole/mixed) language: a sudden, previously nonexistent need for communication.

     I’m very interested in my fellow “creolists’ ” thoughts on all this.

     Having delivered this monologue, I specify that I completely honor the beliefs of tribal people of my acquaintance who believe Chinuk Wawa is ancient. I’m not a participant in their cultures and traditions, I don’t claim this language as my property, I just look at with my preferred approach of building beliefs on positive evidence.

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     • Mikael Parkvall on March 12, 2019 at 5:01 am said:

       Thanks. You mentioned some of the thoughts that I as an outsider have had. Another one that you didn’t mention is the purely geographical aspect: if there actually was a pre-Euro pidgin in the area, isn’t it then a bit too much to ask from coincidence that the first permanent Euro-American establishement just happened to be in the exact area where this pidgin’s lexifier happened to be spoken? (I can’t recall having seen anybody comment to that effect, but it could of course be that I wasn’t alone in ”inventing the wheel”).

       And since you’re explicitly asking for input from creolists (though I increasingly hesitate to call myself that, as that subdiscipline is getting less sane by the day):

       My experience is that pidgins (and by extension, creoles) do emphatically not emerge just because an area has an impressive linguistic diversity. It usually has been diverse for quite some time, and as you say, people have worked out other ways of communication acoss ethnic borders. Much as you and I admire pidgins as the wonders of human creativity that they are, fact is that people tend to choose another option if there is one to be had.

       It is tempting to quote the great Bill Samarin on this point:
       ”[The] invocation of linguistic diversity as a causative factor is like saying that forests are the cause of forest fires. Without linguistic diversity there would, of course, be no need for lingua francas, but without other factors we cannot explain the emergence of lingua francas in general and of pidgins in particular” (Samarin 1987:70).

       So my recipie for pidgin genesis is that the contact is 1) extremely sudden (no time to consider the alternatives), or 2) that the ethnic groups involved really don’t like one another, and thus that their members have no interest in being integrated/assimilated into the other one. It seems to me that the fulfilment of one of these can be enough, but the more, the better, of course (from a pidginistic point of view).

       Mutual ethnic dislike has of course accompanied humanity since its birth. But we have not seen the ”suddenness” factor becoming this important before Europea overseas expansion. After all, travelling to another continent then must have been like travelling to another planet now.

       This is not to say that only Euro colonialism could create pidgins/creoles – but I am claiming that it was a very unusual era in the history of humankind that by its very nature (and in all its morbidity) provided an extreme lot of pidginogenetic settings.

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     • chinookjargon on March 12, 2019 at 2:22 pm said:

       A hearty “łush pus kákwa” (amen) to all you say in your comment!

       One of your points that’s a new perspective for me is the “they don’t really like each other” angle. It’s good. I might reframe it, to wrap my mind around it, as “they haven’t yet integrated each other into their social networks — friendship, fictive kin, etc.” Indigenous people and Europeans did indeed immediately set to trying to network with one another in those ways, establishng trading partnerships, intermarrying, reaching formal agreements — whichever were traditional for the ethnic group in question.

       (And, a la Chaudenson’s “creolization of culture”, maybe we can conceptualize a metaphorical pidginization of social networks, although I tend to feel a culture is a culture is a culture, just as pidgins are nothing but languages — merely new ones.)

       At any rate, I’ve been preaching the suddenness-of-contact theory since a course I gave on Chinuk Wawa at UVic in 2005. I find it proves useful as a tool for finding more pidgins, e.g. the Heiltsuk Pidgin I presented at SPCL a couple years back, which showed up at the brand-new Fort McLoughlin (BC), just where you’d expect.

       Suddenness of contact, I agree with you, is not synonymous with Euro colonialism. Instead, it closely shadows rapid technological expansion in modes of travel.

       Given your phrasing in terms of “not liking each other”, we have to keep in mind another factor: the parties in a new contact situation have to want to communicate with each other. Just as Euro colonialism isn’t the point, neither is trade — it’s just that strangers who have goods that you perceive as valuable are people you’ll want to learn how to talk to, par excellence. Thus, lots of pidgins are “trade languages”, but “trade language” is not a sufficient definition of “pidgin”.

       I give full credit to “creolists” for having shown the importance of demographics. In my experience it’s important to combat Eurocentric assumptions by observing that the pidgins of Northwest North America were all Indigenous-language-based, due to the Native people’s outnumbering and overpowering the Newcomers for several decades. Even “French of the Mountains” — which I’ve also presented at SPCL, as a pidgin of Métis French in northern British Columbia — was successful and durable only because it was a language of Indigenous communities, in that fur-traders had extensively married & integrated into those social networks. (Other) French and English became significant inputs to NW NAm pidgins only as Europeans gained in both numbers and influence. To give a parallel illustration from my research, the first literacy in southern interior BC Indigenous communities was in “Chinuk Pipa” (Chinook writing), and shifted to English only as the latter became incontestably dominant.

       All things being equal, then, we could find a pidgin outside a European-related context. A boatload of Chinese traders could have washed up in pre-Columbian Peru with attractive merchandise and advanced weaponry, for instance…

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3. Etienne on March 12, 2019 at 6:31 pm said:

   Dave, Mikael: some thoughts of mine on the topic, as a historical linguist dabbling in creolistics.

   First, it seems to me that it must be remembered that some 99.9% of all pidgins in the history of humanity have disappeared without leaving a trace. A specificity of Euro colonization was its taking place in a context of expanding literacy, after all, and as a result we know of the existence of various pidgins (Mobilian Jargon, Delaware Jargon, Russenorsk, Greenlandic pidgin, Basque-Icelandic pidgin…) of whose very existence we would have no inkling today had it not been for written material on and in these languages. Not only because these pidgins are extinct, but also because they have had next to no tangible impact upon the languages now dominant where said pidgins once existed.

   So: Did Euro colonization indeed generate an unusually large number of pidgins? Or did it record an unusually large number of them? I suspect the latter, frankly: long before Euro expansion, after all, technological change caused abrupt expansion of languages, bringing them suddenly into contact with a great many new ones: think of the overseas expansion of Austronesian speakers from Oceania to Madagascar, of South Semitic spreading into the Ethiopian Highlands, of Greek and Phoenician spreading across the Western Mediterranean, of Bantu spreading across the Southern half of the African continent…or, to take a more relevant case, think of the expansion of the Salish family across the Pacific Northwest. In all these instances, speakers of the various proto-languages must have abruptly come into contact with speakers of numerous different languages, mutually unintelligible and all too often structurally very far removed from their L1. I find it hard to imagine that pidgins, in all the above instances, did not arise as a result of initial contacts involving these and other expanding languages. But until our colleagues over in physics invent a time machine, we do not and cannot (alas) know what those pidgins were like, since we cannot expect these pidgins to have had any long-term impact upon the language(s) which came into abrupt contact once this contact became stable over generations.

   Second, it is clear to me that once this contact was stable pidgin genesis must have been rare to non-existent. In the case of the Pacific Northwest the evidence, to me, lies in the very linguistic nature of the Pacific Northwest as a language area: the linguistic convergence implies language contact, but the shared features (Highly complex and cross-linguistically rare consonant phonemes, suppletive verb roots marking singular versus plural actions, lexical suffixes, highly elaborate morphology…) are so blatantly UN-pidgin-like that the language contact which yielded this convergence must be assumed to have involved full bilingualism (indeed, I find it telling that there does not, to my knowledge, exist a single recognized language area whose shared features make the languages, as a whole, more pidgin-like than languages immediately outside this language area). For this reason I too lean towards believing that the birth of Chinook Jargon must be directly related to European exploration/colonization.

   Third, my hunch is that what is specific to Euro colonization isn’t the birth of a large number of pidgins, but rather the birth of a large number of creoles (I can explain what I think the causes of this state of affairs were, if either of you or somebody else is interested).

   And fourth, I am a bit puzzled, Dave, when you refer to “French of the Mountains” as a pidgin: as I recall it looks more like (L2?) Metis French than like a pidgin.

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   • Mikael Parkvall on March 13, 2019 at 11:22 am said:

     I agree with Étienne that 99.9% of all pidgins in history probably died unnoticed, and that documentation by westerners is one of two reasons why settings involving Europeans are so overrepresented.

     But I still maintain that pidginisation is a rare event indeed in the history of humankind. (And by that I don’t men people speaking with a funny accent, but the development of an actual pidgin).

     I also agree that creolisation is a much more of a Euro phenomenon than pidginisation. I’d even say that we can count that as a fact – the vast majority of creoles have European lexifiers, while the pidgin lexifiers are far more varied. I suppose we can ascribe that to Westerners having been better at moving people around who didn’t want to be moved around in the first place.

     And finally, I too had the impression that French of the Mountains didn’t look very pidgin-like, although I haven’t seen much, and what little I did see was many moons ago.

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   • chinookjargon on March 14, 2019 at 4:01 am said:

     I value all of your comments above, Etienne, hayu masi. As for calling F.O.T.M. a pidgin, I admit I was kind of using Thomason & Kaufman’s definitions (1988) to make my own polemical point — that BC is something of a pidgin hotbed. Call F.O.T.M. anything, though, as long as it’s recognized as a contact language!

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4. chinookjargon on March 10, 2022 at 5:33 pm said:

   Another quite compelling fact: George Gibbs’ astonishingly well informed 1877 “Tribes of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon” reports that the Yakama & Klickitat Sahaptins’ oral history has it that they took over their territories — adjacent to Kiksht Upper Chinookan & Kathlamet Lower Chinookan land — from Salish speakers.

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