“Klahowya” has White folks written all over it

There’s no equally or more reasonable explanation for the loss of the /m/ from ɬax̣á(w)yam.

Kla-how-ya runs aground (image credit: In the Windermere)

To distill my thoughts of many years on how we wound up with “klahowya” in lots of dictionaries of Chinuk Wawa:

• Those dictionaries, being written things and produced by about 1909 or earlier, were of course directed to a White audience. Literacy among Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest was uncommon. (Except for the circa 1890-1915 wave of Chinuk Pipa in southern British Columbia.)
• It was White folks who used Chinook Jargon words amongst themselves, in English, as a regional slang.
• Paralleling the way that Nuučaan’uɬ (“Nootka”) words demonstrably came into CJ in pronunciations that show the rough handling of English speakers, the CJ and other Native words that went on to PNW English display White folks’ speech habits.
  • A great example is hə́m-ùpʰuch for ‘skunk’ (literally ‘stinky-butt’), which White folks turned into local English hump puss (seemingly influenced by English pole cat).
  • Aside from pronunciation changes imposed by English speakers, I’ve also often pointed out meaning changes (the sticks meaning the backwoods is no longer understood to literally have its Jargon meaning of ‘the forest’).
  • Syntactic mutation was also rampant, I’ve often shown, as in the Jargon verb pá(t)lach ‘give’ becoming a regional English noun potlatch ‘a gift; a giveaway’.
• Notably, Jargon words that were taken into the numerous PNW Indigenous languages tended to preserve the Chinuk Wawa pronunciations, meanings, and part-of-speech categories!

So, today, I want to definitively say:

“Klahowya” is White. We have a large amount of on-the-spot testimony from previous days that English speakers believed this word actually came from English “Clark, how are you?” and similar ideas.

We know that this word is originally ɬax̣á(w)yam, that it comes from Lower Chinookan and means something in that language (approximately ‘someone’s poverty’), and that virtually everyone except some White folks continued to pronounce it with the /m/ at the end.

Bonus fact:

Someone started a Wikipedia page at one time, intending to document Chinuk Wawa as spoken by White folks. I’m unclear what their motives were, and I’m not finding that page now.

But I can verify that, yes, there were distinct White folks “accents” in Jargon, meaning particular sets of tendencies involving pronunciations, grammar influenced by English or French, and of course choices of spellings.

However, let’s never forget, those who used CW as an intercultural language, whether they were Native or not, demonstrated a steady recognition that English-influenced Jargon was not the gold standard of fluency.

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?