Notes on the Structure of Chinook Jargon

Bibliographic Data

ID7900063
AuthorsMelville Jacobs (corresponding author)
Year1932
Volume8
Issue1
Pages27
Publication date1932-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/409299
OpenAlexW2320336322
LanguageEN
Citations received11

The best earlier treatment of the Jargon is Horatio Hale's Manual of Chinook Jargon (1890).1 The bibliography of Jargon is large; no published material examined has been satisfactory for the study of its phonetic and structural phenomena; semantics and word origins, with which we are not concerned, can be studied in other publications. Chinook Jargon is the lingua franca formerly employed by Indians and whites in the coastal district from southern Oregon to Alaska and west of the Rocky Mountains. The Jargon is being forgotten rapidly; a new lingua franca, English, is replacing it. A century ago, Chinook Jargon was the unique and beautifully satisfactory means of communication between the speakers of a hundred or more mutually unintelligible Pacific Northwest languages. Thousands of older natives and hundreds of older whites in the region can still speak it, and even now it is by no means a dead language. However, the younger natives can travel satisfactorily with a knowledge of English alone; they no longer feel stimulus or need to acquire Jargon. And whites no longer trouble to learn it. Probably the most fluent ancient speakers of Jargon lived in the lower Columbia River country--with its tributaries-, in central and western Oregon and Washington. They were from birth speakers of Chinook proper, southern Coast Salish, Klikitat Sahaptin, Molale Sahaptin, Kalapuya, and contiguous languages. Among these people Jargon vocabularies, idioms, and style were relatively rich and effective. The speakers of Jargon farther in the Columbia basin interior, in the Puget Sound country and in British Columbia, knew that the lower Columbia natives spoke a better lingua franca. Among the Oregon and

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