CHINOOK JARGON, an Indian trade language probably of considerable antiquity, which is known to have been in use along the Pacific Coast of North America from Califor nia into Alaska for more than a century. It has had incorporated into it during that time numerous foreign words, but the body of the language is still essentially Indian. This jar gon was named after the Chinook tribe at the mouth of the Columbia River, who first intro duced it to the traders and settlers at Astoria. The white hunters, who entered the Columbia River region, accepted it as the easiest means of communication with the natives. This so called Chinook jargon is made up of Chinook, Nootka, Salish and half a dozen other tribal tongues, and undoubtedly it had its origin in the extensive trading carried on all along the Pacific Coast, long before the first white man visited the mouth of the Columbia. It consisted of commonly recognized words and phrases, which have been variously estimated as num bering from 500 to 1,000. Among these there
existed, at the close of the last century, a few French, English and Russian words and phrases; but the great body of the vocabulary was Indian, in which Chinook predominated. This Chinook lingua franca is rapidly dis appearing from along the Pacific Coast, but it is spreading and growing in importance in the interior of Alaska, where it promises to be as useful in the development of trade and com munication with the natives as it has been in the past in the regions from which it is now being crowded out. Apparently the Chinook jargon was never a steady quantity, for obso lete words form a part of the collection of almost all vocabularies made of it. Moreover, the jargon differed in different parts of the territory in which it was spoken. Consult Hale, Horatio, of Oregon Trade Language' (1890).