Chinuk Wawa was sometimes suspected of being an enemy code during the US Civil War…

Here is yet another neato frito confirmation that “stop” was a very common BC Chinook Jargon synonym for the various uses of míɬayt…

A decade pre-Klondike gold rush, a Montana newspaper article about Alaska has little else to do than reminisce about how the Jews, supposedly, were taking over that Territory at the time of the… Continue reading →

“She” spoke really good Chinuk Wawa, and “Deer Ed.” didn’t need to translate it for his readers.

From the wonderful old language discussion forum, American Notes and Queries, comes this note on a Pacific Northwest English borrowing from Chinuk Wawa: Icta (Vol. v, pp. 66, etc.). — Icta, or icter, is a… Continue reading →

It’s time to update the first linguistic study I ever published on Chinuk Wawa. (That’s a live link, if you want to go read some scholarly prose.)

IMHO: this one is right up there with the greatest productions of Google Translate, or of any nonsense verse writer.

Compare this with the 100% Chinook Jargon “Songish Legend” that I’ve separately written about…

This article specifies that the following took place “over fifty years ago”, so it was perhaps around 1859, early in Settler era of BC.