Proof of concept: How to say ‘grandfather’ in Northern Chinook Jargon

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You won’t find texts in the Northern Dialect using the word chúp for ‘grandfather’.

In my 30 years of experience, that word is unknown in places like British Columbia.

You’re always safe with the descriptive expressions mama yaka papa (‘mother’s father’) or papa yaka papa (‘father’s father’).

(In the same way, Northern Dialect speakers just say tənas yaka tənas for a ‘grandchild’. That’s your ‘child’s child’.) 

There are further ways to express ‘grandpa’, though, as we find documented in the following snippet from somebody’s speech to 2,000 Indigenous people in New Westminster, BC:

Kimta, aias taii arch bishop Lanshva, iaka nim
‘After that, the great chief Archbishop Langevin, whose name’
wiht “Lãshvĩ” iaka mituit, pi iaka
‘is also (written) Lãshvĩ, stood up and’
wawa kopa tilikom,
‘told the people.’

“Yutl naika tomtom nanich msaika ukuk son:
‘ “I’m glad seeing you folks today;’
…Ukuk son naika mamuk iht
‘…Today I’m installing a’
chi bishop kopa msaika; naika patlach iht
‘new bishop for you; I’m giving you’
papa kopa msaika; kakwa naika tiki pus msaika
‘a father; so I want you to’
kwanisim komtaks naika alta kakwa msaika
‘always know me from now on as your’
ol man papa, kakwa msaika gran fathir.
‘elder father, your grandfather.” ’

— from Kamloops Wawa #159 (December 1897), page 183

“Ol man papa” is clear enough, I’m sure, when you use it real-world contexts. But in the Kamloops Wawa newspaper, it’s only used for an ‘aged dad’, other than in the quotation above.

“Gran fathir” was probably understood well by BC speakers of Chinuk Wawa. They brought lots of English words that they heard every day from White folks into their CW, and they certainly knew “fathir”. We see that word a lot in Indigenous people’s letters in Chinook Writing.

The words for your various family members and relatives are one of the liveliest illustrations of how the Southern and Northern Dialects differ. Most of the Salish- and Chinookan-derived words for them, normal in the South, are total mysteries to a Northern ear…

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
Ikta maika chako-kumtuks?
What have you learned?
And can you say it in Jargon?

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