[laláng] and/or [laláŋ]: French AND English influence
Today’s piece is dedicated to friend of Chinuk Wawa and Francophone extraordinaire, George “La” Lang 😁
The 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary of Chinuk Wawa, the best thing out there, contains the word lalang ‘tongue; language’.
Image credit: French Learner
The pronunciation given uses /ŋ/, the “eng” sound in English “song” and “saying”: lalaŋ.
That dictionary shows phonetic “eng” in all of its source materials…
…Except one: Modeste Demers, from the Fort Vancouver era, who gives < lalak >. This is essentially the earliest documented form of the word.
And it’s actually the expected pronunciation!
Expected, because French words containing nasal vowels (such as < la langue >, i.e. /lalãg/) routinely got de-nasalized on being adopted into Chinuk Wawa.
So we’d expect a CW /lalag/ ~ /lalak/, the latter showing typical Indigenous-influenced variability between voiced stops like /g/ and un-aspirated voiceless stops like /k/.
Well then:
How did the lower Columbia River region get a pronunciation /lalaŋ/?
2 Key Ingredients
To my understanding, this would have happened later, in stages.
#1: French
This would require a continued presence of Métis/Canadian French speakers in the Chinook Jargon-using community.
I understand “continued presence” to mean local families. Inter-generational transmission of French.
Even regular visits by non-resident French speakers aren’t enough, typically, to influence a language.
Anyways, we do know there have been (originally) French-speaking families continuously in the lower Columbia area since 1811 — think of Fort Astoria a.k.a. Fort George.
But that’s not enough. The mere known presence and influence of French in the Chinook Jargon world is only enough to supply us with steady input of a pronunciation like /lalãg ~ lalãk ~ lalaŋg ~ lalaŋk/.
#2: English
To achieve the step forth from those actively French-influenced pronunciations to the more recent Chinuk Wawa /lalaŋ/, you also need English.
Why?
Simple!
Of the languages that have played much of an influential role in the formation of the Jargon, only English has a frequently used phoneme /ŋ/.
And, of those languages, only English has a strong preference, documented through many centuries, of turning a word-final /ng ~ ŋg/ into a simple /ŋ/.
(This is a historical reason why written English, which is always more conservative than the spoken language, represents the /ŋ/ as < ng >.)
English was in fact widely heard and known by Jargon speakers of the lower Columbia region from post-Fort Vancouver times onward. The key historical factor here is, to me, Settlers becoming numerically and socially dominant beginning roughly 1850.
For the far western USA and Canada, we can usefully generalize “Settlers” to indicate “English speakers”.
The upshot?
This word lalang ‘tongue; language’ in Chinook Jargon is a one-word lesson in the history of the Pacific Northwest all the way back to fur-trade times!
Wouldn’t this be a plausible candidate for the influence of writing (via phrasebooks and such)?
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I would want to find other examples of the influence of writing on Grand Ronde people’s speech. I expect such a thing to be quite rare, considering we’re talking about the pronunciations of elders born into a mostly non-literate community ca. 1855 to ca. 1910. The one attributed example of “lalang” in the Grand Ronde dictionary is from John B. “Mose” Hudson, born perhaps 1860, and he has a phonetic “eng” sound as the coda.
Few of the earliest documented occurrences of this word in Chinook Jargon are written in clear phonetics, but Horatio Hale 1846 (1841 data from the Fort Vancouver area) has < lalan >, which suggests at least the loss of the final /k/ of the original French, for what it’s worth.
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