Traces of Chinook Jargon in Achumawi?
The farthest southeast that I’ve found accounts of people speaking Chinuk Wawa is in Modoc-Klamath country of far south-central Oregon, which abuts Achumawi territory, in the northeastern corner of California.
The northern slice of California (image credit: NCIDC)
Did the Jargon get into Achumawi land?
Today I’m here to get into the free, online dictionary of Achumawi.
Bruce Nevin says in that dictionary:
The language is classified as Palaihnihan. The ISO Code is acv. Another variation of the name of the language is Achomawi. This language is spoken by the following registered ethnic groups: Alturas Indian Rancheria, Pit River, Redding Rancheria, Round Valley Indian-Round Valley Reservation, Susanville Indian Rancheria. Originally there were nine dialects. Both Achumawi and Atsugewi [atw] are heritage languages of the Pit River ethnic group.
The name Achumawi comes from this word in the language:
acúmmááwi 1 N ‘river dweller’ 2 A ‘river-dwelling’ 3 name people of Fall River valley’
Here I’m not showing you the loaned (often from English) personal names and place names, nor words from neighboring Indigenous languages such as Wintu, nor words from the post-frontier era such as ‘automobile’ and ‘location of a boarding school [Chemawa]’.
The overall trend of the non-Indigenous borrowed words is that they came from English: ‘harness’, ‘cotton’, ‘cat’, ‘flour’, and so on. These far northern California tribes had little contact with (Mexican) Spanish speakers during the pre-USA period, but after that, they were on one of the immigration routes used by English-speaking Settlers.
Achomawi speakers were never within the core zone of Chinook Jargon use, although they may have been on a route used by fur-trade workers into the Sacramento Valley by 1828. Probably only a few Achumawi speakers picked up any CJ.
That would have happened about the same time as the Settler immigration era, and before approximately 1850. (That was the date by which Settlers had become numerically, economically, and politically dominant.)
Now then: the only Achumawi-dictionary words that I feel we might argue a Chinuk Wawa origin for are these 3:
- alapʰaat̓a potato sp[ecies].’
This is reminiscent of the Canadian/Métis French la pataque, which we know was used in some regions’ Chinook Jargon. I haven’t found a similar word in the neighboring Native languages to Achumawi. Of course it might be purely Achumawi; I know very little about parsing words in this language.
- kʰóópʰi coffee’
I would have argued for a simple English etymology here, if it weren’t for the long “o” sound that makes this more like Chinook Jargon than like the average Settler’s pronunciation of ‘coffee’.
- kussu 1 N ‘hog’ 2 loan ‘pig’
For this word, I can’t find a better source than Chinook Jargon. The very likely supplier of this word is the westerly…therefore closer to known CJ-speaking lands…neighboring language, Shasta, where ‘pig’ is documented as the CJ loan kúsa.
So, Achumawi would seem to be at, or just beyond, the very farthest southeast limits of historical Chinuk Wawa-speaking country. There are some, but extremely few, CW words loaned into this language. That’s about the same pattern we find in other far-northern California languages such as Karuk and Wiyot. (I’ll write separately about Shasta.)
