[BRIEF NOTE] Chinook Jargon's accelerated rise and abbreviated fall

[rfmcdonald]

Chinook Jargon (Wikipedia, Language Hat), also known as Chinook Wawa, is a creole language that was once spoken throughout the Oregon Country, a region that once stretched uninterrupted from the northern frontier of Mexican California to the south of Russian America. Emerging from the contact of European traders and settlers and puissant indigenous cultures, Chinook Jargon flourished, becoming a language of wider communication throughout the region and even a first language. If only the Oregon Country hadn't been included in one or another overwhelmingly powerful and profusely immigrant-sending empire or transcontinental federation; if not, then Charles Lillard and Terry Glavin's very and characteristically readable A Voice Great Within Us would not have documented the retreat of Chinook Jargon as English advanced, but the stabilization of a thriving pidgin language spoken by a happily multiethnic and multiracial population.