OMG! How endangered is Chinuk Wawa?
One scholarly research paper recently concluded that Chinuk Wawa is on its deathbed. Let’s see if you’ll agree!
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Yeah, yeah, pour some more!
Today’s essay takes a memorable Archie Bunker moment as its theme.
Acres of clams?
Itʹs funny how you find more Chinuk Wawa in Pacific Northwest newspapers after the frontier period than during it…
Fleas, lice, & history
Rats! This may be a tangle of coincidences, I’m not sure…
Novel divorce suit (worn-out joke)
As the Northwest moved well past the frontier era, our newspapers featured many versions of a joke where a White person speaks Chinook Jargon to an Indian — who turns out to be… Continue reading
Howdy from tax-free Skookum, Oregon
The local news leads off with a reference to the local Lake Wobegon of its day, Skookum, Oregon:
Bring out the wapsina! When the Redmen come to town, you go full Chinook Jargon
Does sex sell dry goods to Red Men?
English-influenced Chinuk Wawa is not “acrolectal”
People whose Chinuk Wawa is fit onto English-language sentence frames, or drop lots of English into their Chinuk Wawa, shouldn’t be mistaken for “acrolectal” speakers. Let me demystify…
Fictional Chinook Jargon isn’t always atrocious…
From the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Jane Austen Book Club”, some high-class fictional Chinook Jargon.
El Comancho’s “copo” is copacetic
The other day I mused about Chinuk Wawa dictionary writer WS “El Comancho” Phillips’s weird pronunciation-spelling of k’áynuɬ ‘tobacco’ as < chinoos >.