
Chinook Wawa, a pidgin language that combined Nootka, Chinook, French, English - MiriamWeiner
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181002-north-americas-nearly-forgotten-language
======
antics
What a strange thing to see on HN. I am from Wasq'u tribe, and one of the very
few people on the planet who has a dictionary for Kiksht Awawat, the dialect
of upper Chinook from which the Chinook Wawa borrows many words.

There are perhaps 3 fluent or mostly-fluent speakers left.

I am also one of the only descendants actively attempting to learn the
language. I travel 5 hours down to the Warm Springs reservation Sunday to work
remotely and learn the language, and commute back up on Wednesdays.

There are many anthropologically interesting things about learning the
language:

\- Languages die like people. The speakers have forgotten useful things, like
"brown".

\- The language is well-tuned for a way of life that has been more or less
obliterated. It is a river language, and the idioms/vocabulary/etc. are geared
towards fishing. But the Dalles dam destroyed the fishing ground. The language
will never be what it was.

\- The Kiksht dictionary would be very useful to the speakers of Chinook Wawa
on the Grande Ronde reservation, but because the tribes dispute land, the
Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs won't give them the dictionary.

------
partycoder
Native languages magically disappeared because their native speakers, after
10,000+ years living in the same region, abruptly became very bad at living,
and died.

There's also 50% chance that it was settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing and
genocide.

~~~
oh_sigh
Ok but this is a pidgin of a bunch of languages, including European, Native
American, and even Asian ones. All this means is that all those groups were
trying to talk to each other, which isn't a bad thing.

Chinook Wawa only became a thing < 300 years ago, and died out not because of
genocide or colonialism, but probably because the prestige language of the
area shifted to the point where it made most sense to just speak that
language.

~~~
antics
No, that's not correct.

As I said elsewhere in the thread, my family is Wasq'u, and we spoke Kiksht, a
dialect of Upper Chinook that Chinook Wawa borrows from.

The boardings schools implemented on the reservations had the stated and
explicit purpose of obliterating the culture, customs, and especially
language, of the indigenous people.

If you hang out for any amount of time on the reservation, you know that
people stopped teaching their kids the language because they were afraid of
what would happen to them if they did not assimilate. The evidence is
incontrovertible. There is no factual account that contradicts this.

I would know -- my grandmother was the first Native American woman with 2
PhDs, and her thesis was literally about this. I have been steeped in this
history since I was a child.

------
cgrubb
> It was used so extensively that it was the language of courts and newspapers
> in the Pacific Northwest from about 1800 to 1905. This makes it sound like
> all the newspapers were in Chinook Jargon. But the only such paper I've been
> able to find was this
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamloops_Wawa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamloops_Wawa)
> —first published in 1891 and doesn't seem to have had too wide of a
> circulation.

