page_title: Chinook Jargon
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Chinook Jargon / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover, Gill's Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, 13th Edition, 1891. Photographed at Log House Museum, Seattle, Washington.
context_page_description: Chinook Jargon is a nearly extinct American indigenous language originating as a pidgin trade language in the Pacific Northwest, and spreading during the 19th century from the lower Columbia River, first to other areas in modern Oregon and Washington, then British Columbia and parts of Alaska, Northern California, Idaho and Montana while sometimes taking on characteristics of a creole language. It is partly descended from the Chinook language, upon which much of its vocabulary is based.
  Chinook Jargon language use itself stretched from Alaska, the Yukon, and general British Columbia in the North, down through Puget Sound and Oregon, and in the southernmost areas it was in North California. In the east it stretched to Idaho and Montana.
  Many words from Chinook Jargon remain in common use in the Western United States and British Columbia today. The total number of Jargon words in published lexicons numbered only in the hundreds, and so it was easy to learn. It has its own grammatical system, but a very simple one that, like its word list, was easy to learn.
context_section_description: The Jargon was originally constructed from a great variety of Amerindian words of the Pacific Northwest, arising as an intra-indigenous contact language in a region marked by divisive geography and intense linguistic diversity. The participating peoples came from a number of very distinct language families, speaking dozens of individual languages. By 1840, it had creolized into a native language for some speakers. It peaked in usage from approximately 1858 to 1900, and declined as a result of the Spanish flu, World War I and residential schools.
  After European contact, the Jargon also acquired English and French loans, as well as words brought by other European, Asian, and Polynesian groups. Some individuals from all these groups soon adopted the Jargon as a highly efficient and accessible form of communication. This use continued in some business sectors well into the 20th century and some of its words continue to feature in company and organization names as well as in the regional toponymy.
  In the Diocese of Kamloops, British Columbia, hundreds of speakers also learned to read and write the Jargon using Duployan shorthand via the publication Kamloops Wawa.  As a result, the Jargon also had the beginnings of its own literature, mostly translated scripture and classical works, and some local and episcopal news, community gossip and events, and diaries. Novelist and early Native American activist Marah Ellis Ryan (c. 1860-1934) used Chinook words and phrases in her writing.
  In Oregon, Chinook Jargon was widely used by Natives, trappers, traders, employees of the Hudson's Bay Company, missionaries, and pioneers who came across the Oregon Trail from the 1830s-1870s. In Portland's first half century (1840s-1890s) there were frequent trade interactions between pioneers and Native Americans. After about 1900, when such daily interactions were less frequent, Jargon was spoken among pioneer families to prove how early they arrived out west. Many Oregonians used Jargon in casual conversation—to add humor, whimsy or emphasis and to exhibit deep knowledge of Oregon's history. Though traditions of speaking Jargon faded away among the non-Native population, some of Oregon's tribal groups continued speaking Chinook Jargon, though usage was diminished.
  According to Nard Jones, Chinook Jargon was still in use in Seattle until roughly the eve of World War II, especially among the members of the Arctic Club, making Seattle the last city where the language was widely used. Writing in 1972, he remarked that at that later date "Only a few can speak it fully, men of ninety or a hundred years old, like Henry Broderick, the realtor, and Joshua Green, the banker."
  Jones estimates that in pioneer times in the 1860s there were about 100,000 speakers of Chinook Jargon. The language was being used, even entire paragraphs, without translations in local newspapers from at least Oregon and Washington states. It was also used by teachers to teach natives at school, by shopkeepers to sell things, by courts as an interview tool or to judge if a person was a citizen or not, by priests to teach religion, and between children playing on the street.
  In the 20th century, Chinook Jargon entered a slow decline. As late as the 1940s, native speakers were still being born in Tiller, Oregon, but by 1962 the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) estimated that only 100 speakers were left. In the 2000s, Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon started a three-semester university program teaching Chinook Jargon The 2010 United States Census recorded 640 native speakers.
caption: Cover, Gill's Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, 13th Edition, 1891. Photographed at Log House Museum, Seattle, Washington.
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