Welcome back to the Chinook Jargon blog! I took a hiatus to work on some grants, and I’ve missed you. The other day on Facebook, I gave a heads-up that this site will… Continue reading →

In the Chinook Jargon Word of the Day group on Facebook, the inquiring mind of Colin Bruce put forth Father Le Jeune’s little-known 1924 list of Chinook Jargon month names…

Quick!  Our safety depends on it!  (That’s how I get unfiltered linguistic data out of people.)  Translate tluchman-sik into English!

A lot is known about Chinook Jargon’s words — but what about its ideas?

One of my correspondents who consistently asks great questions brought this up: Why do we say kʰúl-íliʔi, literally “cold land”, for “winter” in Chinook Jargon?  Is it an Indigenous thing?

Some deeper background for you on a well-known basic word of Chinook Jargon.

A discovery? Leave it to the extravagant Roman emperor Heliogabalus (the dangerous transgender Syrian immigrant, not to be confused with the friendly Martian autism-whisperer of that name) to show us something new under the… Continue reading →

Chinook Jargon’s connection with the Northwest fur trade is proverbial.  But until now, we’ve had extremely little documentation of how people talked in CJ about the trapping side of that equation.

A constant source of sustenance for your curiosity:  The motherlode of Chinook Jargon words that nobody seems to have researched before.  Here’s a new one.  (Warning: offensive language.)

I’ve written about several recent (circa 1891-1904) loans from the Salish languages into Kamloops (BC)-area Chinook Jargon.  They come from two main regions …