Chinook Jargon was a trade language that once ruled the Northwest. But when was it used, and how many people spoke it? Listener Michelle LeSourd of Seattle asked KUOW's Local Wonder. I stopped by Michelle LeSourd’s house to see what sparked her interest in the language. On her coffee table was an unpublished memoir, “Incidents in the Life of Francis Ancil LeSourd.” There’s a line inside that inspired her question. “It just simply says, ‘both my grandfather and my father spoke Chinook, a mixture of English and Indian languages,’” she said. LeSourd’s ancestry traces to Whidbey Island. Her great, great-grandfather settled there in the 1880s. He was a white guy, a sort of gentleman farmer and member of the territorial legislature.

Local Wonder: Do Pacific Northwesterners Have An Accent? But how did he come to speak Chinook Jargon? LeSourd could only guess. My next stop was the Internet where, wouldn’t ya know, there was a site called chinookjargon.com. David Robertson, a linguist in Spokane, is the keeper of this site. Robertson, whose Ph.D focused on Chinook Jargon, was not surprised that LeSourd’s ancestors on Whidbey Island spoke the language. He told me that early white settlers communicated with Native Americans in Chinook Jargon after arriving in the Pacific Northwest.

“Whidbey Island was one of the first settled places by non-native people in what was called North Oregon, in other words Washington,” he said. “Whidbey Island is kind of the earliest cradle of Chinook Jargon use on Puget Sound.” The story of Chinook Jargon – or Chinuk Wawa, its Native name – is a story of contact in the Northwest. Robertson said it evolved as Native and non-Native people met and needed a way to communicate – for trade or just to talk. Documentation of the language dates back to 1805, Robertson said. “In the journals of Lewis & Clark, anecdotes like this: ‘Native people would comment’” – and here Robertson broke into Chinuk Wawa – “That would mean, ‘Hey, great gun. I’ve never seen one like that before.’”

So what would our local tribes have to say about this language? Tony Johnson, chairman of the Chinook Indian Nation, met me near Long Beach, Washington, at the mouth of the Columbia River where it meets the Pacific Ocean. Local Wonder: The Strange, Short Story Of Washington State's Income Tax “We’re at a place called Chinook Point; people know it as Fort Columbia State Park,” Johnson said. “A very important place for us historically.” This was a key spot for the fur trade some 200 years ago. When strangers met here, they needed a common language.

“People, by the way, have debated the origin of this language, Chinuk Wawa,” he said. “All I can tell you is my elders told me that it existed before European contact.” Johnson, a fluent speaker and teacher of the language, said Chinuk Wawa is an offshoot of the Chinookan language, which was exceedingly difficult to learn. So the Chinook people created this shorthand, initially as a way to talk with other tribes. “We were able to go into those communities and sing a love song to a girl we thought was particularly beautiful,” Johnson said. “It allowed this communication over a great distance.” Local Wonder: Where Do Seattle-Area Crows Go At Night? Over time, explorers, traders and settlers helped the language spread far and wide. And it became a creole, or first language, for a generation of children. Johnson said there were roughly 100,000 speakers of Chinuk Wawa by the 1890s, extending from northern California to southeast Alaska and to the Rocky Mountains.