Final answer? There are (actually, were) 3 dialects of Chinook Jargon.
Ever since my research showed that there’s a very distinct dialect of Chinook Jargon that’s historically spoken north of the Columbia River, I’ve been talking about a 2-way split, of a “Northern” versus a “Southern” Dialect.
Image credit: Atlas.com
Both the Northern & Southern dialects, though, are distinct from the original, “early-creolized” variety (as I’ve long called it) of the Jargon, associated with the lower Columbia River localities of:
- Fort Astoria (a.k.a. Fort George) and
- Fort Vancouver.
That historical dialect is primarily associated with the Métis community at and originating from those settlements, so it’s also the language of:
- the Willamette Valley (French Prairie to Umpqua), Oregon;
- Cowlitz and Nisqually, Washington; and
- Fort Langley, BC.
So, I’ve realized the most sensible thing to do is to refer to this oldest, culturally Métis, variety the “Central Dialect”.
From it, the 2 others later radiated out.
My exposure to the hours of 1940’s audio recorded from speaker Joe Peter (Cowlitz Tribe) has made me aware that this older Central dialect continued to be spoken into modern times.
Joe Peter is also the person who fully made me realize that the Central dialect is really distinct from the Southern dialect.
(I had presumed previously, in the lack of data, that Central had become the Southern variety.)
Joe Peter’s speech is just like what we find of Columbia River-area Jargon as documented by lots of observers during the fur-trade and Settler eras.
Here a sampling of ways Central has always differed from the Southern (i.e. Grand Ronde-area, “re-creolized”) dialect:
- No verbal reduplication in Central,
vs. full-root reduplication in Southern (e.g. nánich-nanich ‘to be looking around’). - No shortened pronouns in Central (in fact Joe Peter prefers the longest 3rd person singular form yax̣ka over all dialects’ shared yaka),
vs. Southern dialect short forms like ya, ma, nsa. - Central doesn’t shorten the verbal prefixes (or call them auxiliaries or helping verbs) such as the Causative mamuk-,
vs. Southern dialect’s virtually total switch to the reduced form munk-. - Central seems to have “grammaticalized” fewer words into such prefixes, so that it seems to lack hay(u)- for ongoing action (and hayu just means ‘a lot’ in Central),
vs. Southern dialect’s larger inventory of such forms. (Northern dialect also has more than Central.)
So here’s the tally of the known dialects of Chinuk Wawa, with a short descriptor of the communities and linguistic status associated with each:
A. Oldest (centered on the lower Columbia River):
1. Central (Métis)
Originally a pidgin, then early creolized.
B. Newer (farther away from the lower Columbia River):
2. Northern (many tribes + Settlers)
Re-pidginized.
3. Southern (Grand Ronde reservation community
Re-creolized.
The chances of identifying any other stable dialects of Chinook Jargon are essentially zero.
There were some quirky later local varieties, for instance in farthest-north Southeast Alaska, but the distinctiveness of those amounts to extremely heavy daily mixing with English, which was already dominant in those areas. And so English rapidly eclipsed those kinds of Chinook Jargon right out of usage.
