Talk:Chinook Jargon

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Pronunciation and spelling

I have read in this discussion that there is no right pronunciation, but could there be a more-conservative pronunciation or a more-English pronunciation just as an example? Even some details on the wrong pronunciation might do it. A detailed range of pronunciation variants would be useful and interesting. I'd like to know more about this speech, but as someone with a non-English name, i know better than most folks that pronunciation is not based on spelling, excepting some acronyms. Speaking of spelling, how consistent is the spelling? Are there silent letters? Is there a difference between <c> and <k>? Is <gh> one consonant or two? And so forth. --Leif Runenritzer (talk) 06:34, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Leif, there definitely can be such a thing as wrong pronunciation, I'll have to search that reference out elsewhere and reply there too, but for now, let me see if I can answer your question. The question is rooted in a particular source of confusion: old orthographies. Most of them aren't very consistent in their representation of sounds. Perhaps I can illustrate the difference this way: there are variants, and there are mispronunciation. For a word like lhatwa you can also find the variant lhatuwa and lhatu. All of these are words that are used and documented to be in use. There are many variants of words, which means that, in a sense, pronunciation is fluid. However, it would be a mistake to say there is no wrong pronunciation. Consider, for example, kha ("still") and qha ("where?"). kha is pronounced with an apirated velar stop (like our "k" sound in English), but qha is a uvular stop. To pronounce qha with a velar "k" sound would of course be wrong, and would of course mean something else.Nvolut (talk) 19:54, 3 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Skookum article up for AfD

User:Huon has started an AfD to get rid of the Skookum article; where the mentions of the Skookum doll and Skookum (cat) went and other citations that were on it went, I don't know, but now there's only the Skookum Tools ref left......which to me is emblematic and representative of the persaviness of the word and concept in modern local usage, and because its information on the meaning of the word is one of the only pages out there that's usable as a cite; the argument that that's not a linguistics cite is totally spurious; this isn't a a language article. On pages about CJ usage by natives, yes, there are further definitions; but this is about non-native use and the presence of this word in NW culture/identity. If only populist usages are there to be cited, it's a form of academic exclusionism.....though there is a Barbara Harris essay on the word out there somewhere, about its adoption into local English and so on....but instead of do some research and improve and cite the article, the deletionist agenda has seen nothing better to do than to try to get rid of it.....Skookum1 (talk) 02:56, 28 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

de-watchlisted this page

I grow wear of the need to patrol this page for biases of the core-bias group, and given my health and age know it's time for me to let go. That the POV fork to Chinook Jargon as used by English speakers has been allowed to stand and nobody else has questioned it says a lot to me of the inherent biases of most others around here, and the paucity of publications in the field that are independent of the biases circulated by the modern/GR group mean it's pointless in Wikipedia guideline/RS terms to try to hold forth here on all the things that are wrong with the premises here and in the sources. That I never published in the field, or had the funding support to proceed with much-needed sourcing or extensive archives around BC that have gone ignored, speaks to the biases of the field and those who have made it into their own image. Time for me to hang it up, anything I'd publish would be critiqued as "he's white anyway" so why bother? one snotty edit comment from a newbie using GR spelling in his user name was enough to tick me off and...well. I'm done. Have the playpen to youselves all you want now. I'll try not to look and learn not to care.Skookum1 (talk) 06:43, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As I responded on my talk page, sorry for being "snotty", but I do stand by my edits. I would also like to reiterate that it is highly inappropriate to accuse those who disagree with you of racial bias as many of us are multi-racial and many highly respected teachers, researchers, and students of the language are white. Instead of accusing those who disagree with you of disliking white people perhaps you should consider why the words you write are being challenged. Maybe the problem isn't that we're being reverse-racist (as if that's a real thing), but that what you're writing is inaccurate and/or offensive. I appreciate that you often encourage others to examine their biases, but I think you should take care to do the same. pʼiɬiɬskin 22:38, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Notable non-natives known to speak Chinook Jargon

Does anyone have any sources on these? Specifically, I'm wondering about Robert Service. I know he used the term cheechako (chxi-chaku), but I can't find any info on him actually knowing the language. It's of particular interest to me as he's a relative of mine. Also, on an unrelated note, should this section just be called "Notable Speakers of Chinook Jargon"? The page definitely has a white focus and I think it would be good to bring in notable Indians as well (Mungo Martin, Eula Petite, Frances Johnson, Charles Depoe etc etc).pʼiɬiɬskin 22:27, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Good questions! This may require a bit of research in print sources. We have two different audiences for articles like this-- the linguists studying and documenting the languages, and the actual speakers and language learners themselves. I've been using the RNLD newsfeed to update language revitalization efforts. It's clear there's a need both for WP:RS and informed editors from the current language communties. Posting input on these talk pages is very helpful! Djembayz (talk) 14:01, 5 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

that section title may be residue from the former POV fork article, in which non-native use ("English" was used though non-native speakers included Chinese, Japanese, Swedes, French etc) was segregated from native use.Skookum1 (talk) 06:13, 9 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"Chinookology" and "Chinookologists"

This term was alleged to have been "not a word", but it is in use and was first heard by me from the late (?) Barbara Harris during our encounters in the early days of the "online Jargon revival"..... it has also been used, I believe, by Terry Glavin, who was co-author with Charles Lillard of A Voice Great Within Us. Formation of words by adding -ology is not illegal in English.Skookum1 (talk) 06:18, 9 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Full-fledged language

Is Chinook Jargon a full-fledged language or not? I haven't been able to determine this. My apologies if this has already been discussed elsewhere. Wolfdog (talk) 23:33, 12 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It started off as a pidgin (not a full-fledged language) but eventually creolized (became full fledged). I hope the current version of the article is clearer. — kwami (talk) 01:14, 9 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The IPA here is a mess

Title. the table is ugly, it's overly defined with English pronunciations, sorted alphabetically and not by place of articulation, and inconsisttent with Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Omoutuazn (talk • contribs) 02:48, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

done, partially - but this still needs improvement Stan traynor (talk) 20:28, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Touch up

I added some references as requested in the section for words used by English-language speakers, especially the controversial Siwash. Hopefully for the better. Fimbriata (talk) 20:00, 15 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes but what is this language like?

This article doesn’t give any information about the language! I came across Chinook in an article about the evolution of French. The author Raymond Queneau observed that in the previous 50 years, the syntax of spoken French had altered radically and he claimed that this form of the language, which he termed néo-français or troisième français, resembled Chinook. A typical sentence consisted of a list of substantives followed by a “skeleton” sentence with pronouns replacing the substantives. Example ‘’Le gendarme, le voleur il l’a attrapé’’ ("The policeman, the thief, he caught him” for "The policeman caught the thief"). The phenomenon, which I have observed myself, doesn't happen in English nor as far as I can see in other European languages. See https://www.grin.com/document/323136 for details. I would have liked to see if this is indeed also the case with Chinook.

Franciscus montmartinensis (talk) 16:43, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I believe you are looking for http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Chinookan_languages . Chinook and Chinook Jargon are seperate but related things. Friendofcacti (talk) 19:43, 25 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Number of living native speakers

@SMcCandlish Recently, I changed the number of "native speakers" listed in the language infobox from "More than 640 (at least 3 native adult speakers alive in 2019 based on estimates from the Chinook Jargon Listserv archives)" to "1". Shortly afterwards, you removed the listing of just one native speaker saying "Claiming there is exactly one speaker is also unsourced speaker information, and almost certainly wrong."

I was surprised by this because I thought the source that I had provided a source, specifically the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online (APICS), through the template's ref parameter. Additionally, I think there is an important distinction to be made between native speakers and speakers who have learned the Chinook Jargon as a second language.

Sources, including the APICS one I mentioned earlier do point towards there being a second language community for Chinook Jargon. Specifically, the APICS source suggests "maybe 1000 people with L2 knowledge (via oral or written means)" and the self-report 2009-2013 American Community Survey currently cited in the article estimated 20-70 people spoke Chinook Jargon at home in the United States. As to there being precisely 1 native speaker living, a situation where the exact number of native living speakers is known isn't uncommon for endangered Native American languages, compare the Upper Chinook language where the number of remaining native speakers was precisely tracked and known over time as they died.

If there are some additional details about my initial edit which explain why it was partially undone, I would be interested in learning about those. Thanks and take care. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 19:53, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@The Editor's Apprentice: My bad; I've restored your "1". I didn't notice that the |ref= parameter has output that is specifically attached to the output of the |speakers= parameter (which is frankly pretty weird infobox coding), or that |speakers= outputs a specifically "native" speakers claim (which is confusing since the parameter doesn't match its rendered name, and probably not helpful anyway, since I doubt our readers care much about number of people who knew a language since childhood versus number of people who actually know a language, and at any rate our readers probably care much more about the latter). Since Chinook Jargon is a trade pidgin or creole, it seems dubious that it is the first language of anyone at all, even if there remains a speaker who has known it since they were little as a second language learned alongside their first. The entire notion of "native speaker" in a case like this is kind of dubious, and the infobox presently suggesting that there is only 1 speaker is misleading, and would basically mean that this is a dead language (a language you can't speak or write intelligibly with anyone else in the world is already dead for all intents and purposes). Anyway, at very least the second-language learning material you mention from APICS and ACS is probably worth adding to the article. But the infobox also supports |speakers2= to add information on total speakers, or another option is using |speakers_label= to remove "native" from the output of |speakers= and use a larger number there. I think we should do something to make it clearer to a reader of the infobox that there is not just one speaker left. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:10, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Vondonalk

the language Vondonalk is spoken in Haida Gwaii and is a Vulnerable language as a new Nuu-chah-nulth script as the main character in this book. It is a Sioux-Chipewyan language that 3,765,174 people speak in Canada, Mexico, and Greece. In that case, let’s move on to the Vondonalk 1400 BCE era. There was a script called “Vond” and 5,000,000 people spoke it. But, in Europe, it turned into a Latin-Salish-Lushootseed language that 4,300,000 people speak. But now, in 2025 and aging, it is ancient and mediaeval. And it spread towards Canada, United States, Mexico, Brazil, and all of Central America. within time, it has spread to Greece, Japan, and Tasmania. and it turns out to be in a new unknown country called Abbotsford Island. And it speaks English, French, Punjabi, Halq’emeylem, Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwak’wala, Lakota, Inupiaq. As the new country has been known, it is 4,000 years old. Older than Canada. M0mmy99 (talk) 01:08, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Common Evania War

Evania has been here for 560,000,000 years and now it’s in war! It’s in war with Israel for 2 years. but Israel almost gave up. but 4000 and counting years ago, it was part of the Ottoman empire. but it collapsed. I feel sorry for the Ottoman empire… but I couldn’t give up. I was in the war too. So, I had to do this and I WON!!! and Evania is turning into a country in 2036. M0mmy99 (talk) 01:14, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, newcomer. Will you wise up and stop posting Markov gibberish, lose interest and go away, or get banned? —Tamfang (talk) 03:07, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Removing from Metis category?

I noticed that this article is attached to the metis template. There's no historical basis for Chinook Jargon's identification as a language of the metis people. Their languages, Michif and Bungi are more than trade languages. I know that it's mostly semantics, but I think we should remove this article's attachment to the metis. GreenHillsOfAfrica (talk) 00:47, 27 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]