“Subject pronoun, subject pronoun” is probably really old in Jargon
With that settled, the next question may be whether this comes from casual French, as I suspect, meaning it dates to Fort Astoria/Fort Vancouver days, but not earlier.
This is a pattern where a subject personal pronoun gets repeated as a way of strongly topicalizing it and/or making a contrast with some subject that follows.
Image credit: Juicy English
A restriction to subjects is no surprise at all. Us linguists can explain to you that human subjects universally tend to be the most topical, spotlighted parts of sentences…whereas nonhuman subjects, objects, & such are only more rarely treated as the star of the show. So this pattern doesn’t happen with non-subject (that is, object etc.) pronouns, nor indeed with non-personal and interrogative pronouns (like ‘what’ or ‘who’ or ‘how many’).
It’s an older, (and) Southern-dialect, thing.
We can tell this quite neatly from our Northern-dialect data, such as the sentences below. How so? Well, it’s only in the words of priests in Northern areas like BC that we see this pronoun-doubling pattern. We essentially never find Indigenous people saying it in the North. (In the Kamloops area, Native folks have their own, different pattern of subject pronoun-doubling, which is mostly confined to 1st person singular naika ‘I’.)
You’ll find the same subject-pronoun-doubling pattern alive & well nowadays in the Southern Dialect, that is, the Chinuk Wawa that’s associated with, and taught by, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in northwest Oregon.
The story I see here is that the Northern priests had been taught by speakers of the more southerly varieties of the language. (Particularly of the Central Dialect, the oldest of all, which was associated with the lower Columbia River.) That’s how we wind up with a situation where a Northern-dialect newspaper, Kamloops Wawa, sometimes contained the doubled-subject-pronoun pattern.
But it certainly wasn’t those southern-leaning priests who had taught Indigenous people in the north how to speak Chinook Jargon, so this pattern didn’t catch in BC. Those people learned organically, by in-person contact with an increasing population of newcomers (let’s call them “miners”), many of whom were less than stellar in their grasp of the grammar.
In many other ways, too, we see that there was an erosion of CJ grammar as it got transplanted northwards; the language quickly changed from being a creole intra-community language back to a pidgin inter-ethnic language.
It’s easiest to find these examples in the Kamloops Wawa newspaper by looking for a pronoun + comma + the same pronoun again. For contrast, my sense of currently living Southern-dialect speakers is that they don’t think of there being any punctuation in there.
Okay, here are some examples showing you what I’m talking about — so you can learn to talk this way if you’re a student of Grand Ronde’s variety of Jargon:
yaka ‘(s)he; (sometimes) they’:
Wik
‘It’s not’iaka, iaka wawa; liiam iaka iskom iaka lalan.g,
‘him that’s talking; the devil’s taken hold of his tongue;’liiam patlach ukuk masachi wawa kopa iaka.
‘the devil gives those bad words to him.’— Kamloops Wawa #142 (July 1896), page 155
ɬaska ‘they’:
Klaska, klaska ashnu kopa ukuk tanas man…
‘They too kneeled to that boy…’— Kamloops Wawa #135 (December 1895), page 188
msayka ‘you folks’:
…pi msaika, msaika
‘…and you folks are clean,’tlus pi wik kanawi.”
‘but not all (of you).’— Kamloops Wawa #137 (February 1896), page 41
mayka ‘you (singular)’:
Kopit maika, maika lolo ukuk tlus wawa…
‘It’s only you that’s bringing this good news…’— Kamloops Wawa #131 (August 1895), page 123
nayka ‘I’:
Tlus pus naika, naika klatwa
‘How about if it’s me that goes’— Kamloops Wawa #130 (July 1895), page 103
nsayka ‘we’:
Mamuk pus iht klaska tomtom kanawi kanamokst
‘Make them all have one heart together’kakwa nsaika, nsaika kopit iht.
‘so we’ll all be one.’— Kamloops Wawa #138 (March 1896), page 64
