In post-frontier era towns, in the Chinuk Wawa heartland, the language was quickly seen as passé.

The southern (early-creolized) dialect of Chinuk Wawa is just plain “heavier” than the northern (later, re-pidginized) dialect.

Just recently I showed you that “Chinook” in a number of interior Pacific Northwest languages became the word for ‘venereal disease’.

Settlers considered much of Washington state unexplored wilderness until pretty recently.

Just putting this here.

“Hello Sweetheart”!

hayu masi to Robert Kyniston in the Facebook “Chinook Jargon” group for posting copies of these!

Senior Chinook Jargon scholar and Saturday Zoom group participant, Dr. Jay Powell, told us an interesting tidbit…

Much appreciation to David Gene Lewis, PhD, for providing me a copy of Jean-François Prunet’s interesting article!

While researching the etymology of the name “Chinook”(*), I happened upon a couple of occurrences of similar-sounding words in interior Pacific Northwest languages…