Chinook Wawa, a pidgin language that combined Nootka, Chinook, French, English | Hacker News Reader

Chinook Wawa, a pidgin language that combined Nootka, Chinook, French, English

bbc.com

21 pointsMiriamWeiner6 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

When was the last time you saw a Native American? How often does that happen?

Why do you think there are so few?

Why don't most people in America partially look like natives in a continent that used to have millions of them?

Use your goddamn common sense. Your revisionism is offensive.

> 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 —first published in 1891 and doesn't seem to have had too wide of a circulation.

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