When we comb through a dictionary of a Pacific Northwest Indigenous language, we often find wonderful preserved bits of Chinook Jargon — and so it with the Sliammon Coast Salish language of British… Continue reading →

From the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation in post-frontier times, we hear of a big party thrown by a respected tribal leader…

Song #8 from Myron Eells’s little book, “Hymns in the Chinook Jargon Language“, 2nd (expanded!) edition (Portland, OR: David Steel, 1889):

I won’t be surprised if we learn that the following poem is an accusation of a real murder!

We’ve recently seen a few examples of weird conjunctions popping up in Northern-Dialect Chinook Jargon; here’s another.

Another of the precious, and popular, photos in “Kamloops Wawa”, the Chinook Jargon newspaper, showed its readers much more than the caption told.

A visiting group from an Iowa newspaper in the late frontier era witnesses the huge intercultual gathering of hops pickers talking Chinuk Wawa…

Thanks to JD Norton for this find!

The 21st pair of pages in this precious document again brings us plenty of stuff worth knowing about Chinook Jargon.

Chinuk Wawa has a tendency to simplify /nd/, at the end of a word, to /n/.