Reading Room · Language
Chinuk Wawa: The Trade Language of the Pacific Northwest
On the frontier the novel moves through, people who shared no common tongue still had to trade, travel, marry, and make terms with one another. The tool that let them do it was Chinuk Wawa, a trade language of the Pacific Northwest, and it is the world that produced men like Enos, useful to everyone because he could carry meaning across the line between one people and the next.
The opening pages of The Renegade Enos show him working between Spanish, English, and, in the novel's words, "a low run of sound that was neither." That third register is the mark of a particular kind of man on this frontier, someone who could stand in the gap between languages and make a deal happen. Behind the skill lay a real thing, a shared trade tongue of the Pacific Northwest that let strangers do business across the lines that separated them. Its name is Chinuk Wawa, also called Chinook Jargon.
What a trade language is
A trade language grows up wherever people who need to deal with one another arrive speaking different mother tongues. It is a contact language, a pidgin, which means it belongs to no single people as a first language and is learned by all sides as a second. Its job is narrow and practical. It moves goods, sets prices, asks directions, strikes agreements, and passes news across a line that words would otherwise not cross.
Because its job is practical, it stays lean. A pidgin keeps a small working vocabulary and a simple grammar, enough to be picked up quickly by a trader, a sailor, or a packer who has other work to do. What it gives up in range it returns in reach. A few hundred shared words, held in common by people from many nations, can carry a great deal of the daily business of a frontier.
Where Chinuk Wawa came from
Chinuk Wawa drew its words from several sources at once. Its base lay in the Chinookan languages of the lower Columbia River, with a strong contribution from Nuu-chah-nulth, the language of peoples on the western coast of Vancouver Island whom early maritime traders knew as the Nootka. To that base the fur trade added French, carried by the French-Canadian voyageurs and company men, and English, carried by American and British traders and settlers. Smaller contributions came from Salishan and other Native languages of the region. The result was a tongue with roots on both sides of the encounter.
How old it is remains an open question among linguists. Some hold that a limited jargon already moved along the Columbia trade network before European ships arrived, used by Lower Chinook traders in their dealings with distant peoples. Others place its beginnings with the maritime fur trade of the late 1700s, in the meetings between ships and the Nuu-chah-nulth. What is clearer is when it spread. The land-based fur trade, and in particular the founding of Fort Astoria near the mouth of the Columbia in 1811, drew many peoples into steady contact around the trading posts, and the Jargon grew into the common tongue of that world.
How it worked and who used it
Chinuk Wawa did its work with a small and flexible stock of words. A single term could stretch across a range of related meanings, its exact sense settled by context and by the people speaking. This economy was the point. A packer, a shopkeeper, a missionary, or a farmer could pick up enough of it in a season to get by, and enough people did that its reach ran from central British Columbia south into northern California.
It turned up in places a passing camp slang would not. It was spoken in shops and on docks, used in court testimony, printed in newspaper notices, and taken up by missionaries who wanted to preach across the language line. By the 1870s, one commonly cited estimate put the number of people who could use it near a hundred thousand. Some of its words outlived the trade that carried them and settled into the regional English of the Northwest, where a few remain in local use. Potlatch, the word for a gift-giving ceremony, came through the Jargon, as did skookum, meaning strong or powerful. They are small survivals of a tongue that once did the ordinary business of a wide country.
A tongue this lean had its limits, and everyone who used it knew them. Chinuk Wawa could name a price, seal a bargain, give an order, or carry a warning, and it could do these things quickly among people who had no other words in common. For the deep matters of law, kinship, ceremony, and grief, a speaker still reached for the full language of home. This is part of why the go-betweens mattered so much. Where the shared jargon ran out, someone who truly held two languages had to step in and carry across what the trade tongue alone could not.
The language of the reservations
When the wars of the 1850s ended, the surviving peoples of western Oregon were gathered onto reservations, inland at Grand Ronde and along the coast at Siletz. The people brought together there had come from many different nations and spoke many different languages, and they needed a tongue in common. Chinuk Wawa became that tongue. On the reservations it did something a trade jargon rarely does. It became a home language, spoken in families and learned by children as a first language, which is to say it became a creole.
The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde carried it forward through the generations. Today the tribe teaches it as a community heritage language through an immersion program and has published a dictionary drawn from the speech of its own elders. That turn is worth sitting with. A language built to let strangers deal across a line became, for the people the conquest had uprooted and thrown together, the ordinary speech of daily life. The tool of the frontier became the tongue of the reservation, and it survived to be taught to children who are alive now.
The go-between
A world stitched together by a trade language runs on the people who can speak it well. Every deal across the language line needed someone who could stand in the gap, hear one side, and carry its meaning to the other. These were the interpreters, the guides, the packers, the mixed-heritage men and women who had grown up with more than one tongue in their ears. They were useful to everyone who needed to cross the line, and they belonged cleanly to no one on either side of it. That position carried its own price. The go-between was trusted only as far as the deal held, and suspected by both sides the moment it went wrong.
Enos is a man of exactly that position. The novel opens on him working the seam between Spanish and English and that "low run of sound that was neither," and the phrase names the whole shape of his life. He is valuable because he can move between worlds, and he is safe in none of them. The men who employed him needed his tongue and his knowledge of the country, and they carried no loyalty to him past their need. When his usefulness ran out, the frontier that had leaned on his voice discarded him, and the record kept less of him than it kept of the men who used him.
Chinuk Wawa is the emblem of that whole arrangement. It let a crowded and violent frontier keep functioning across its many peoples, and it depended on the ones who could carry meaning through the gaps. The Renegade Enos takes its title character into the heart of that dependence, to the eye level of a man the frontier could not do without and did not protect. To read his story is to see what the trade tongue made possible, and to feel the cost paid by the people who spoke for everyone and answered to no one.
The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is a novel by H.L. Delaney, forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press, the conquest of the West at the eye level of the man it used and discarded. More documented history sits behind the book at The History Behind the Novel, and the trade world that made this language is covered in The Hudson's Bay Company and the Fur-Trade World. For the man at the center of it, see Who Was Enos? Get launch news →
Sources & further reading
- Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Chinuk Wawa: kakwa nsayka ulman-tilixam laska munk-kemteks nsayka / As Our Elders Teach Us to Speak It (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). The tribe's dictionary of the language, drawn from the speech of its own elders.
- "Chinuk Wawa Language," Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. The tribe's account of the language and its immersion revitalization program.
- George Gibbs, A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, or, Trade Language of Oregon (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1863). A nineteenth-century compilation from the years the Jargon was in daily use across the region.
- George Lang, Making Wawa: The Genesis of Chinook Jargon (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008). On the origins and history of the language and the long debate over how it began.
- "Chinook Jargon (Chinuk Wawa)," The Oregon Encyclopedia. A concise overview of the language, its sources, its spread, and its speakers.