According to our best information, the name "Chinook" (which, to be historically correct, should be pronounced with "ch" as in English church) originally belonged to one Native village, located on the north bank of the Columbia River near its mouth. American and British seafarers, who upon "discovering" the Columbia River in 1792 quickly incorporated the lower river into the era's international fur trade, early adopted the name to refer both to the Columbia River and to the lower river's indigenous inhabitants, who for the most part closely resembled the people of Chinook village in appearance, language, and culture. When referring to the people and their original tribal languages, the name usually appears today as Chinookan.

"Chinook" came into early general currency also for a local hybrid medium alternatively termed "(the) jargon" (hence also, Chinook Jargon, or following local Native usage, Chinuk Wawa). Chinook Jargon was universally resorted to by the early traders in preference to Chinookan languages, which were reputedly exceptionally difficult. Local non-Chinookan Natives had more options for communicating with Chinookans, inasmuch as many of the latter also spoke neighboring tribal languages. At the same time, we know of few local non-Chinookan Natives who could in turn speak Chinookan. Before English came into general regional currency, Chinook Jargon was the lingua franca of the entire lower Columbia, linking Natives of different tribes as well as Natives and foreigners.

Scholars have spilled a good deal of ink debating the origin, historical development, and linguistic description of Chinook Jargon. A relatively small, but grammatically and semantically central portion of the Chinook Jargon lexicon comes from the Nootkan languages of Vancouver Island, some 200 miles north of the lower Columbia. Linguistic analysis of this part of the lexicon reveals grammatical and phonetic distortions consistent with adoption by European-language speakers, confirming historical indications that these words were introduced by the seafaring traders, who had been at Vancouver Island before first entering the Columbia River.

Altogether, the seafarers and English-speaking resident traders and settlers who followed them contributed as much as 20% of the Chinook Jargon words used on the lower Columbia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: roughly 15% of these being derived directly from English, 5% from seafarer-pronounced Nootkan. Yet, it cannot be taken for granted that the early foreign traders therefore created Chinook Jargon. In that case, the larger part of the lexicon attributable to Chinookan (which on the lower Columbia is more than twice the size of the English contribution) should show gross distortions like those affecting the Nootkan part, but it does not. While sometimes missing Chinookan grammatical markers, virtually all of Chinook Jargon's Chinookan-contributed words show intact Chinookan word-forms, albeit Whites tended to drop certain features of indigenous pronunciation retained by Indians.

So far, scholars have been unable to agree on when and how Chinook Jargon originated, some arguing that it arose as a direct or indirect result of contact with the seafarers; others that it is rooted ultimately in indigenous trade and slavery far predating foreign contact. What can be said with some certainty is that Chinook Jargon's strongly Chinookan character points to the crucial participation of Chinookans in its formation, whenever exactly that took place. And there is no disagreement that the land-based fur trade, commencing with the founding of Astoria in 1811, was key to the dissemination of Chinook Jargon beyond the lower Columbia into the Pacific Northwest at large.

An important role in the language's development and spread during this period was played by the ethnically mixed or Metis offspring of local Indian women and fur company employees. One legacy of the families so founded is the approximately 15% of the Chinook Jargon lexicon derived from French, the predominant language of the fur company rank-and-file.

During its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinook Jargon was spoken throughout the Pacific Northwest, from northern California to the Alaskan panhandle and from the coast well into the interior plateaus of the Fraser and Columbia rivers. During this period, it acquired an embryonic written literature, composed primarily by missionaries who resorted to it as a way around the diversity and forbidding complexity of Northwest tribal languages.

While long since displaced by English as the region's lingua franca, Chinook Jargon survived for many generations in the Metis and Indian communities of the lower Columbia. For some modern descendants of these communities, it retains positive symbolic associations with indigenous identity. Recently, the language has been undergoing revival, notably at the Grand Ronde Indian community, Oregon, where it is taught as a community heritage language.

Henry Zenk
Henry Zenk is currently a consulting linguist with the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community. He was first exposed to Chinook Jargon thirty years ago, when he began studying the language as spoken by some of that community’s last fluent speakers.

Sources

Wurm, Stephen A., Peter Mühläusler, and Darrel T. Tryon. Atlas of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Mouton de Gruyter: 1996.

Samarin, William J. “Chinook Jargon and Pidgin Historiography.�? Canadian Journal of Anthropology 5:1: 1986.

Jahr, E. H. and I. Broch. Language Contact in the Arctic: Northern Pidgins and Contact Languages. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996.