A Childs Dictionary of Chinook
Being slightly neurodiverse I never spoke until I was three years old, simply pointing and smiling at people. My parents even considered having me checked for deafness or possibly even being deaf-mute. But as my Mother often mentioned, once I started to talk I never stopped – literally!
I think those three years of silence allowed me the chance to see the world in a different, more detailed way than those who were prattling and goo-goo-ga-gag’ing from the age of 8 months. And it allowed me the chance to create my own language, of sorts, some words of which I use to this day (and no, while ‘Fuckheaded Peter!’ remains one of my favourite curses it was not part of my childhood vocabulary!).
About the first word I ever spoke was the word ‘Bonjer’, a word that drove my family nuts. “Bonjer!” I would exclaim during one of our Sunday drives and immediately about 6 pairs of eyeballs would scan in all directions to see if they could figure out what the heck ‘Bonjer’ was.
One Sunday, while driving through a construction zone we had to follow a large cement truck, one of those behemoths with the massive rotating cylinder on the back you think is about to splat 10 tons of cement goo on the hood of the car.
“Bonjer!” I yelled out from the backseat, “Bonjer!”.
“Cement truck?” My Father quizzed over his shoulder as he tried to avoid running into the truck.
“Yes!” I exclaimed, “Bonjer!” (“Yes” being perhaps the second word I ever spoke).
My Father roared with laughter (rare for him), my Mother threw up her hands and everyone in the backseat shook their head, squeezed my cheeks or gave me noogies on the top of my head.
So where am I going with this?
Language should not be a political weapon, nor should it be used to put down those of lesser education or economic background. Nor should it ever be used to render inferior those coming to this country from the ravages of war or other awful situation!
Language is all about communication, sharing of ideas, hopes, dreams and ensuring that there is Pineapple on my pizza!
Growing up in Oyster Bay, we had English speakers, Norwegians, Dutch people and people from Saskatchewan, who speak an entirely different brand of English using such words as ‘gooms’. It took me months to realize Mrs. H meant ‘gums’. And we had First Nations people speaking their own dialects.
Unlike the rest of Canada, B.C. has long had a dialect of English specifically for communicating with First Nations people, primarily for the buying of furs and other commodities. First used in the Columbia River region of present day Oregon, ‘Chinook Jargon’ or ‘Chinook Wawa’ migrated north with the traders as far as Alaska and persists in pockets to the present day. In fact at one time there was a newspaper in Kamloops written entirely in Chinook Jargon, that was very popular within the community.
To the children in Oyster Bay, Chinook Jargon was as natural a part of our language as English. Our parents included Chinook words in their everyday speech and it was passed down to us.
The words were simple; like ‘chuk’ for water, salt water becoming ‘saltchuk’ and as a result we often referred to the Straits in front of our house as the ‘saltchuk’ or simply the ‘chuk’.
The Chinook word for big was ‘skookum’ so big water such as waterfalls or rapids became ‘skookumchuk’, and in fact there is a town in the interior of BC named Skookumchuk for exactly that reason! Skookum could also refer to a person, a big, strong young man referred to as a ‘skookum lad’.
‘Klahowya’ is one of my favourite words in Chinook Jargon, mostly because it almost sounds like English. If you look closely at the word you will start to see the expression ‘how are you?’ and in fact Klahowya means ‘Welcome!’ or ‘Hello!’. When combined with the Chinook word for friend, ‘tillicum’ you end up with ‘Klahowya Tillicum!’ or ‘Welcome Friend!’. The word ‘Tillicum’ is also found in street names in the capital, Victoria, at the south end of Vancouver Island.
On the other side of the coin, someone who is too big for their britches or considers themselves better than the rest is a ‘muckety-muck’, and there were degrees of that too, from ‘muckety-muck’ to ‘big muckety-muck’ to ‘great high muckety-muck’ which was usually reserved for political leaders such as the Premier or Prime Minister.
So if you were from ‘off Island’ or ‘out of province’ travelling the Island Highway in the 1960’s the language spoken by children might have sounded a bit odd but we all knew what we meant and were communicating.
And we might have thought you just a bit of a muckety-muck for looking down your nose at us!