Permanent contact: pidgin/creole Chinook Jargon has always been a fast-evolving language
Chinook Jargon has always been a rapidly changing language.
Maybe all pidgins (indeed all contact languages, including creoles and mixed languages) should be described that way?
How are pidgin languages like super glue? 😁
(image credit: Power Townsend)
Depending on your cultural, historical, and linguistic points of view, this may seem to be obvious — or else, outrageous.
It seems possible to me that such languages not only come into being seemingly overnight, from the historical perspective, but that they develop at a pace that’s brisker than we see in “genetically descended” languages.
Every now-existing contact language is known — or the best evidence indicates it — to have begun its existence within a blink of time’s eye: about 500 years ago at the earliest.
The vast majority of the pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages date back no further than half as long as that.
Chinuk Wawa a.k.a. Chinook Jargon cannot be older than 230 years old, according to the case I’ve made with my research.
And if you’ve read about the history of CW research, for instance in George Lang’s popular book “Making Wawa“, you know that this language used to be very different from the Jargon we now know and speak.
In fact, the earliest forms of the Jargon, if you’re currently a speaker of it, would be nearly unintelligible to you.
Its grammar and vocabulary have mutated massively — and have stabilized, whereas there used to be a great deal of variation in early Jargon.
That’s a huge degree of change for a couple of centuries, when compared with virtually any “genetically descended” language. (A member of a “language family”, or any non-contact language.)
The English of 1794, for instance, is easily 99% comprehensible to me when I come across it in documents.
Yes, I might have greater challenges speaking English in the ways the folks of 230 years ago did, but we’d understand each other fine all day long.
To give you one simple yardstick of the rapidness of change in Chinook Jargon: it developed into 3 distinct dialects within about 3 human generations.
And the southernmost and northernmost of those 3 use grammar and words differently enough that there’s a widely noted mutual intelligibility gap (this, from the reports of numerous people who are learning both varieties):
- Speakers of the creolized “Southern Dialect” of Grand Ronde, Oregon tend to understand nearly all of the words in the pidgin “Northern Dialect” that’s typified by British Columbia speech — but those words get used in many consistently different ways.
- Speakers of Northern don’t know a bunch of Southern words — and the grammar of Southern has alien subtleties.
When I was doing the enormous amounts of reading in contact linguistics that led to my 2012 PhD, I didn’t see very much discussion, that I recall, of contact languages typically growing fast.
I may well be mistaken in that impression of “the literature” on this subject. But what I clearly recall, and what I most easily find in an online search right now, is that we linguists have instead mostly noticed that there is fast language change in language contact situations.
That fact alone helps explain why both pidgins and mixed languages should evolve rapidly once they come into existence. Both of those kinds of languages exist, by definition, in contact with other languages.
I think creoles also typically exist in contact with other languages, although I’m not aware of any linguist having shown or suggested that that’s a definitional trait of them. We might take ideas like the “creole continuum” and “decreolization” as supporting a permanent-contact model.
At all events, it’s no brilliant insight to point out that language contact is in fact the typical state of affairs for all languages. Most humans have been and are multi-lingual, multi-dialectal, and so forth.
But it may be that contact languages, which come into being abruptly, have a real tendency to continue developing fast.
The most thoroughly revitalized dialect of Chinook Jargon, creolized Southern Chinuk Wawa, has certainly changed in many demonstrable ways, due to contact with English, in the generation or so since focused work began to create new speakers.
Maybe that was destined to happen?
