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 The Pacific Northwest (sometimes Cascadia, or simply abbreviated as PNW) is a geographic region in western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Though ...

. 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 The Warm Springs Indian Reservation consists of in north-central Oregon, in the United States, and is governed by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Tribes Three tribes form the confederation: the Wasco, Tenino (Warm Springs) and Pa ...

in 2006. The Northwest Indian Language Institute of the

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a public research university in Eugene, Oregon. Founded in 1876, the institution is well known for its strong ties to the sports apparel and marketing firm Nike, Inc, and its co-founder, billion ...

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 Sauvie Island, in the U.S. state of Oregon, originally Wapato Island or Wappatoo Island, is the largest island along the Columbia River, at , and one of the largest river islands in the United States. It lies approximately ten miles northwest ...

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 or Watlalla, also known as Cascades, now extinct (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 rivers. Kathlamet has been classified as an additional dialect; it was not mutually intelligible.

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)