estimate(s) of numbers of CJ speakers?

[hzenk at PDX.EDU]

While I can't speak for the entire NW, I can offer some clarification  
of the situation for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Ore.,  
where CJ ("Chinuk Wawa") has a tribal language program devoted to it.

As Ros points out, a "speaker" could be any number of things depending  
on who is applying the term and to what ends.  I'll stick to two  
criteria that are reasonably quantifiable:

1. Elder speakers.  At Grand Ronde, these are people who grew up with  
CJ in their family households.  These were the speakers I recorded in  
the early 80s.  To my knowledge there is one person of that generation  
from a CJ-using family still living:  she is about 100 years old now  
(99?), but still lives at home and gets around on her own.

2. Language-revival speakers, that is, products of the language  
program.  Of course, people who have gone through our classes and  
tutoring do not all reach the same level.  But, I am told that the  
"ACTFL" metric can be applied to those students who have stuck with it  
and continue to participate in our various language activities.  The  
program teacher who tells me this says that in his judgment there are  
33 non-elder speakers (including both teachers and students) who can  
converse in CJ at "at least" an "ACTFL intermediate-mid" level  
(personally, I'm not knowledgeable about ACTFL; but perhaps this will  
mean something to other folks out there).

aLqi wEXt, Henry

Quoting Ros’ Haruo <rosharuo at GMAIL.COM>:

> The problem (or a major part of it, anyway), of which we Esperanto speakers
> have been long, famously and often painfully aware, is that in the absence
> of a census authority that has an active interest in minority language
> communities, it is unlikely that really meaningful statistics can be
> collected; the evidence will generally be at best anecdotal, and there will
> be few if any safeguards to ensure that some sort of fluency threshold has
> been met before a person is counted as a "speaker". Most governmental census
> authorities have, if anything, a bias against registering small language
> communities, and the few (e.g. some tribal) that are not biased that way may
> have the opposite tendency, counting speakers where there are really only
> dilettantes and dabblers, and people who wish they were speakers and feel
> shame at not being such.
>
> lilEnd
>
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Sally Thomason <thomason at umich.edu> wrote:
>
>> Dear Chinook Listers,
>>
>> A student of mine is writing a paper on Chinook Jargon
>> and wondering how many speakers of the language there
>> are currently.  A 1990 census report he saw says 17
>> (but that might've been just US speakers, and I assume
>> there are more in Canada).  That number seems awfully
>> low, given the vigorous revitalization efforts that have
>> now been under way for some time.
>>
>> So...does anyone have an educated guess as to how many
>> speakers there are now, in Canada + the US?
>>
>>   - Sally
>>
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>
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