Mother-in-law (et al.) in Central Chinuk Wawa
Under naika ‘I; mine’ in Louis-Napoléon St Onge’s handwritten Chinuk Wawa dictionary that’s about 150 years old, there comes a string of Central Dialect entries that express what I’ll call non-core kin. (No offense to them!)
These are the people you’re related to, conceptually, via someone intermediate. This is how I’m trying to formulate that these terms refer to folks who are your relatives “through” marriage or “through” a different generation.
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Here’s a plug for the study of anthropology. They have exact words for these concepts. Learn them and be empowered.
Let’s get right into a list of these Central CJ kin terms:
- naika ats iaka tanas-tluchman ‘niece, my’
(my sister her daughter) - naika ow iaka tluchman ‘sister-in-law, my’
(my brother his wife) - naika tanas iaka tanas ‘grand-child, my’
(my child’s child) - naika tanas iaka tanas-man ‘grand-son, my’
(my child’s son) - naika tanas iaka tanas-tluchman ‘grand-daughter, my’
(my child’s daughter) - naika-ow-iaka-tanas ‘nephew, my’
(my brother’s child) - naika-tanas iaka-tluchman ‘son-in-law, my’ [SIC!]
actually: (my child’s wife, i.e. my daughter-in-law) - naika-tanas man iaka tluchman ‘daughter-in-law, my’
(my son’s wife) - naika-tluchman-iaka-mama ‘mother-in-law, my’
(my wife’s mother) - naika-tluchmin-iaka-papa ‘father-in-law, my’
(my wife’s father)
You can easily see how these are formed, and how to form more of them.
Unlike “direct” kin such as your ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘sister’, ‘brother’, ‘child’, ‘wife’, ‘husband’, which all are single words in every dialect of the Jargon, these ones are expressed as one of those people’s relatives.
Compare this with the Southern Dialect, centered on Grand Ronde, Oregon. There, some of these relations are single words, typically from Indigenous languages: kʰwiʔím ‘grandchild’ comes to mind, originating from Salish.
And earlier, in the Central and Southern Dialects, there were even more numerous single-word kin terms, such as íqʰix ‘brother-in-law’, coming from Chinookan.
Being perhaps not the most focal relationships in your life (again, no offense to anyone!), most of those earlier Jargon “non-core” terms suffered erosion of meaning — such as íqsix, which began as Chinookan ‘father-in-law’ and got pidginized to ‘parent-in-law’ and ‘son-in-law’ — if not simple deletion quite soon from the Jargon.
Thus, in the youngest dialect, the Northern, you’ll find the set of kinship terms pared down even farther. We don’t even have commonly-known single words there for ‘grandma’, or ‘aunt’.
In virtually every case, any relationship that can be phrased as ‘my X’s Y’ came to be put that way, by the time the Northern dialect took shape. (About 1858 and later.)
By extension of this principle, other kin connections that you could see as being, well, “relative” rather than “absolute” also went away. Here I’m thinking of the earlier Chinuk Wawa distinction between (single-word) ‘younger brother’ and ‘older brother’, for instance. (áw versus kápxu, respectively.) In that sort of case, things merged into a single term that’s applied now to both of those people. (áw won that rivalry.)
