A brilliant map shows why there’s no Russian in Chinook Jargon (and other stuff)
“Russian in Alaska and in Alaskan languages” by the late, great linguist Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska Fairbanks is a brilliant demonstration. You can click that link to see it full-size, but before you go, read what I say below…
The above map shows you numbers of Russian loanwords in the various languages of Alaska.
There are stunningly high amounts in languages closer to Russia (Aleut, Alutiiq/Sugpiaq, Central Yup’ik, Denaina/Tanaina).
Once you get beyond those front-line cultures whom fate made to bear the brunt of direct contact with the Russian Empire, you see arrows pointing out where Russian words got further transmitted to Indigenous people who had little or no direct Russophone experience. Can you say “bottleneck”? The numbers of Russian-etymology items suddenly drops to the low double digits, and to single digits.
And when you get a little further along the landmass, you find Tlingit/Lingít, Tsimshian, and Haida all impervious to such influences. The mere 10 Russian words in Lingít, always a powerful culture violently resistant to outside domination, surely come only from their friendly relations with the Eyak neighbours. (OK, maybe also somehow from the Russkies having their colonial capital at Sitka for a short time.) Haida and Tsimshian show zero Russian influence, direct or indirect. In fact, these 3 ethnic groups traded intensely with British and American visitors, not with Russians.
A historical and cultural comment is super-appropriate:
As James R Gibson documents in his book “Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods”, the Russian American Company fur industry was all about large-scale hunting, which involved being in any one Indigenous territory for just a relatively fleeting time. Contrast this with the North American-based counterpart, where the Hudson Bay Company et al. set up ongoing trading relationships with a large number of Native nations, and lived among them for years at a time.
The Russians weren’t interested in talking with you. The HBC was.
Ergo, no Russian involvement with Chinook Jargon. Your consolation prize is this link to more about Russians on my site.
Bonus fact:
I’d like to think I’ve established that the ethnic term lúshən (Looshan) in Northern Chinook Jargon, even though it comes from a folksy pronunciation of the English word “Russian”, has always referred primarily to Indigenous people from the (formerly) Russian-dominated parts of Alaska.
(Northern CJ also historically recognized stikín (Stikeen) for Lingíts, and knew plenty about the háyda (Haida).)
Small World Dept.:
Michael Krauss worked on the Eyak language of Alaska in the 1950s with my mentor, the linguist Robert Austerlitz.
A more interesting question is why there is no Hawaiian words in Chinook Jargon when they made up 30 percent of the employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The first time that Chinook Jargon was observed as an unambiguous separate language was among the children in the employees’ quarter in Fort Vancouver. The teacher at the school wrote the first known wordlist. Most of the families had French or English speaking fathers and Chinook speaking mothers with some wives speaking Chehalis or other Indigenous languages. Because the Hawaiians were under the protection of their King’s representative, they could live outside the fort in their own structures. Is this the reason there was no contribution to the vocabulary?
Sam, I always enjoy taking this question on. We have lots of documentation of the colonial-era PNW communicative scene to work with.
The Kanaka language wasn’t by any indications a useful one in the Pacific Northwest context. (This, despite its being very easy to pronounce and having a highly learnable grammar!)
Nobody was trying to talk Hawai‘an to the Islanders.
Nobody was writing down vocabularies of that language in order to be able to use them in future, as was often done with Chinook Jargon (and tribal languages).
You couldn’t use their language in the trading encounters with Indigenous PNW people.
Even the considerable number of Kanakas who married PNW women must have been using Chinuk Wawa as well as the pidgin English they knew from Polynesia, and maybe even some North American French, at home.
All of this puts Hawai‘ian into a category with Scots Gaelic as a widely known language among fur-trade workers which nonetheless wasn’t adopted outside their ethnic groups.
For better or for worse, the “blue men” from the Pacific Islands showed a cultural trait of high adaptability to new situations.
And that adaptability meant that they would simply learn as much as they could of “your” language.
But, jeez, returning to an earlier point above, Hawai‘ian would have made ABSOLUTE sense as a lingua franca — under other circumstances. Then we wouldn’t have heard the repetitious complaints about Jargon being “very much sputtered, strangled, swallowed” or whichever caricatures of PNW sounds someone felt like venting!
Dave R
PS: a running tally of rumours to shoot down time & again — in Chinook Jargon there is no trace of Russian; Kwak’wala; “Chinese”; German; Tsimshian; Kootenay; Japanese; Coast Miwok; Quileute; Esperanto; or Volapük.