Upper Chinook, endonym Kiksht, also known as Columbia Chinook, and Wasco-Wishram after its last surviving dialect, is a recently extinct language of the US
Pacific Northwest. It had 69 speakers in 1990, of whom 7 were monolingual: five Wasco and two Wishram. In 2001, there were five remaining speakers of Wasco.
The last fully fluent speaker of Kiksht, Gladys Thompson, died in July 2012.
She had been honored for her work by the Oregon Legislature in 2007.
Two new speakers were teaching Kiksht at the
Warm Springs Indian Reservation in 2006. The Northwest Indian Language Institute of the
University of Oregon formed a partnership to teach Kiksht and
Numu in the Warm Springs schools.
Audio and video files of Kiksht are available at the Endangered Languages Archive.
The last fluent speaker of the Wasco-Wishram dialect was Madeline Brunoe McInturff, and she died on 11 July 2006 at the age of 91.
Dialects
*
Multnomah, once spoken on
Sauvie Island and in the
Portland
Portland most commonly refers to:
* Portland, Oregon, the largest city in the state of Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States
* Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state of Maine, in the New England region of the northeas ...
area in northwestern Oregon
*Kiksht
**
Watlala The Watlala are a group of Chinookan-speaking Native Americans in the United States, Native Americans. They inhabited the meadows of Sams Walker Day Use Site, near Skamania, Washington, and St. Cloud Ranch Day Use Site. An interpretive sign at Sam ...
or Watlalla, also known as
Cascades, now
extinct
Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...
(two groups, one on each side of the Columbia River; the Oregon group were called Gahlawaihih
urtis.
**Hood River, now extinct (spoken by the Hood River Band of the Hood River Wasco in Oregon, also known as Ninuhltidih
urtisor Kwikwulit
ooney
**White Salmon, now extinct (spoken by the White Salmon River Band of Wishram in Washington)
**
Wasco-Wishram (the Wishram lived north of the Columbia River in Washington and the kin Wasco lived south of the same river in Oregon)
**
Clackamas, now extinct, was spoken in northwestern Oregon along the
Clackamas and
Sandy
Sandy may refer to:
People and fictional characters
*Sandy (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters
* Sandy (surname), a list of people
*Sandy (singer), Brazilian singer and actress Sandy Leah Lima (born 1983)
* (Sandy) ...
rivers.
Kathlamet
The Kathlamet people are a tribe of Native American people with a historic homeland along the Columbia River in what is today southwestern Washington state. The Kathlamet people originally spoke the Kathlamet language, a dialect of the Chinookan l ...
has been classified as an additional dialect; it was not
mutually intelligible
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...
.
Phonology
Vowels in Kiksht are as follows: /u a i ɛ ə/.
References
Bibliography
*
External links
*
Kiksht - Washco Wishram - Upper Chinook videos YouTube
at native-languages.org
Digital Kiksht video about digitizing Kiksht language materials
Audio of spoken Kiksht
{{Languages of Oregon
Chinookan languages
Indigenous languages of Oregon
Indigenous languages of the Pacific Northwest Coast
Extinct languages of North America
Verb–subject–object languages
Languages extinct in the 2010s
2012 disestablishments in Oregon
br:Waskoeg-wichrameg
nl:Wasco (volk)