P. Bakker re 3 factors tending against pidgins in N. America

[Jeffrey Kopp]

Have you run across any books on the mixed-blood rancheria culture?
I see a number of tangential references to it in the Jargon
literature, so it must have been fairly extensive, at least briefly,
across this corner of the frontier.

On Thu, 17 Jun 1999 21:33:49 -0700, you wrote:

>Hello,
>
>Peter Bakker in his superb book "A Language of Our Own:  The Genesis of
>Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Metis" (New York:
>Oxford University Press, 1997; page 15) outlines "three factors...that
>hindered the genesis of a pidgin" in the "whole fur trade area in Canada".
>
>1)  "bilingualism[,] by intermarriage especially"
>2)  "existence of lingua francas, which are mother tongues for one
>	powerful tribe but second languages for a number of neighboring tribes",
> 	such as Ojibwe, Huron, Plains Cree
>3)  "a great number of children from mixed European-Indian marriages"
>
>Can't it be said that numbers one and two above clearly applied to our
>Northwestern area as well?  The pattern of intermarriage was as much the
>rule in our region as elsewhere in North America, I hear.  And we had
>lingua francas of may I say various magnitudes, e.g. Nez Perce and Kutenai
>may have been well known, and more so than Spokane, which some say worked
>as a common language of the East Plateau.
>
>The third condition, however, may have been the great point of difference
>with our area.  Here there was no long-standing trend of European-Indian
>marriage, and thus few natively bilingual speakers of both Northwest and
>foreign languages.
>
>It's a small interesting point to think of; in effect, a useful
>restatement with respect to the Northwest facts might be that "substantial
>contacts among groups from farflung homelands encouraged an unusual
>occurrence, the birth of a pidgin in North America".  Nu?
>
>Your thoughts are solicited.
>
>Best,
>Dave
>
>
>
> *VISIT the archives of the CHINOOK jargon and the SALISHAN & neighboring*
>		    <=== languages lists, on the Web! ===>
>	   http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/salishan.html
>	   http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/chinook.html