Chinook Jargon is the *only* living descendant of “Nootka Jargon”
Chinook Jargon is the only living descendant of “Nootka Jargon”.
A sample of words *not* in Chinuk Wawa at the start! (Image credit: KUMTUKS.CA)
This may seem like a tiny, very specific claim to make.
I’ve not said it in so few words before, however.
It’s extremely important.
I’ve been spending years of research, shared on this website as I go along, resulting in the finding that there was no Chinook Jargon during the earliest years of Indigenous contact with Euro-American newcomers.
Hand in hand with this conclusion, there wasn’t any Chinook Jargon in the prior, purely Indigenous, era. (What gets called, in Settler-dominated modern discourse, the “pre-contact” era.)
Neither Chinook Jargon, nor any other pidgin/trade language/creole, shows any possibility of having existed, not until the winter of 1794-1795.
But CJ definitely was built on a foundation of “Nootka Jargon” (which definitely did exist prior to 1794) —
- Several Nuuchahnulth & Haida words of the already-existing pidgin (or quasi-pidgin lingo), used from the Strait of Juan de Fuca northward to extreme southern Alaska, show up in Chinuk Wawa from the earliest known examples.
- And those Indigenous words occur in Chinuk Wawa only in demonstrably English-language-influenced pronunciations, showing us that the “Nootka Jargon” part of CW came in via Euro-Americans, not from Indigenous speakers.
I’ll take a moment to specify that I don’t see CW as the current form of Nootka Jargon. It’s not a genetic descendant of NJ, not like modern English is the great-great-grandbaby of Old English.
Instead, Chinook Jargon is an example among the many that I’ve found in my research, where an existing contact language becomes the basis for yet another, newer contact language. CJ emerged from a blend of Nootka Jargon with northeast USA/British sailors’ English, Lower Chinookan, and Lower Chehalis Salish.
Chinook Jargon, in other words, is equally the “child” of all 4 of those languages! (The enormous Métis French influence came in about a generation later.)
“Nootka Jargon” indeed did have other descendants. NJ was less a coherent language than a diffuse and redundant vocabulary, and apparently not much grammar. Thus, it took unique forms in each major locale of early repeated Native-Newcomer contact, typically incorporating increasing amounts of the local language.
- Thus, by around the 1820s, in (parts of) Haida Gwaii & the nearby Tsimshian mainland, NJ seems to have evolved into a pidginized Xaad Kil (Haida, a language isolate).
- And it’s fairly reasonable to say the remnants of NJ in the 1830s, on the mainland, also gave rise to a pidginized Haíłzaqvḷa (Heiltsuk, northern branch of the Wakashan family). This pidgin very probably was partly influenced by the already-established Chinuk Wawa.
Both of those pidgin languages had short lives. As far as we can see in the historical record, they weren’t used for more than a couple of decades or so.
Nootka Jargon’s descendant Chinook Jargon (CW), on the other hand, remained a vital force in Pacific NW conversations for over a century, and even in 2023 — which is 229 years into its existence by my reckoning — there are folks who remember it from their youth.
Not to mention the fast increasing numbers of new Chinook Jargon speakers!
