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 (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 no official boundary exists, the most common ...

. 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 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 university, public research university in Eugene, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1876, the university is organized into nine colleges and schools and offers 420 undergraduate and gra ...

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 and in the Portland area in northwestern Oregon *Kiksht ** Watlala or Watlalla, also known as Cascades, now

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...

(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 In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

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
{{Indigenous peoples in Washington 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)