A sampler of frontier-era California pidgin Spanish/English/Chinuk Wawa
LINGUISTIC ARCHAEOLOGY / of the Pacific Northwest / with David Douglas "Chinook Man" Robertson, PhD
My readers are steadily treated to the insight (so I claim) that pidgin languages such as Chinook Jargon don’t exist in a vacuum. It’s already agreed — as much as anything is agreed on by specialist linguists — that pidgins are, by definition, not people’s first language. So right there, any pidgin language that you speak coexists with your mother tongue. I go farther. I keep finding that western North America has been a showcase of pidgins. The frontier era shows us a constant interaction among several such. In order to communicate across ethno-linguistic gaps, people blended whatever scraps they knew of how to talk to foreigners. The result was a very frequent mixing of Chinuk Wawa, West Coast Chinese Pidgin English, California Indigenous Pidgin Spanish, you name it. Today, to prove that to anyone who’s not yet convinced, I’m going to throw some evocative data from California, and one piece from Nevada, at you. Read and learn.
https://chinookjargon.com/2019/04/18/a-sampler-of-frontier-era-california-pidgin-spanish-english-chinuk-wawa/