Aspiration: non-distinctive in Northern CW, distinctive in Southern CW
One of the big differences between the 2 living dialects of Chinook Jargon: ± aspiration.
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If you’ve heard audio recordings of the Northern and Southern dialects — which currently amounts to Grand Ronde versus everyone else — this one’s easy to hear.
We’re referring mainly to the “stop” consonants, sounds such as /b/, /p/, and /t/, /g/, /q/, etc.
Northern Dialect: a 2-way system
The stop-consonant system in the Northern variety sounds more like what you hear in English and in the Indigenous languages of say interior BC. So, Northern /b/ and /p/ differ from each other in terms of “voicing”.
A voiced sound such as /b/ has the rumble of vocal cords that you also make when you say a vowel (such as /a/ or /i/). A voiceless sound lacks that rumble.
The Northern dialect, then, has a 2-way contrast in its stop consonants: voiced vs. voiceless.
Southern Dialect: a 3-way system
But in the Southern variety, due prominently to the historical influence of Indigenous languages such as Chinookan, there’s a 3-way contrast. In Grand Ronde-style Jargon, you have the same “voicing” contrast, but a third way of saying a stop consonant is pervasive too: it’s “aspiration”.
In Southern Chinuk Wawa, you therefore have /b/ vs. /p/ vs. /pʰ/.
Again, this is a set of sounds made by positioning your lips etc. in a particular way, and either making that rumble of voicing (for /b/), or not.
Beyond /b/, the Southern unvoiced stops are further differentiated from each other: Aspirated /pʰ/ is very much like regular English “p” — but unaspirated /p/ is more like you might hear from people who grew up speaking Spanish, or Hindi, or Finnish. Are you hearing the difference in your mind’s ear?
Aspirated sounds are marked with a raised “ʰ” to show that they end in a puff of air. Un-aspirated sounds lack that puff, so for instance Southern Chinook Jargon /p/ can sound as if it’s “in between” /b/ and /pʰ/.
I’m going to leave it there, but…
No linguist has ever pointed out this difference before.
And it’s one part of our rock-solid proof that there are now 2 quite different dialects of Chinuk Wawa.
(The other day, I posted an article noting that there historically was a 3rd, Central, dialect. That original form of the language gave rise to the other two, but is no longer spoken.)
Thanks for this, Dave. I’ve often wondered about this. That is, how important is aspiration at Grand Ronde, and why does it seem unimportant in the north? You have answered both questions 🌝
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By “southern variety”, I assume you mean primarily “Grand Ronde-style Jargon”. Wouldn’t we be surprised if the contrast was present in the pidgin speech of palefaces? (that’s not a rethorical question, but an honest one)
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Ah, but the best Chinook Jargon was spoken by Indigenous people in both regions.. And aspiration is non-contrastive in the Indigenous languages that had the most to do with shaping the Northern Dialect — prominently, the Salish family.
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