Fw: Re: estimate(s) of numbers of CJ speakers?

[Don duMas]

I have no idea where this old guy was from other than that he told me he was from Alaska.  If its really important, I could probably find him for you. His son is one of the re-enactors of the Satsop BP club. Let me know if you need to track him down, and I'll see what I can do. 

Klahowya sikhs!

Don duMas
The Blind Art Director
 
206-300-5368 mob
360-629-4283 ph/fx
don_dumas at yahoo.com

--- On Sun, 8/16/09, Don duMas <don_dumas at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: Don duMas <don_dumas at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: estimate(s) of numbers of CJ speakers?
To: "The Chinook Studies List" <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Date: Sunday, August 16, 2009, 9:35 AM







Last year, about this time, I atttended the Seven Rivers Rendezvous outside of Satsop, WA.
As I usually do, I posted a small sign outside my camp stating , "Chinook Wawa Yukwah", hoping to find some other CJ speakers. Generally, I never have any luck with this tactic (hope springs eternal, though), but on this particular occasion I did. 
 In this case It was a gentleman in his late nineties who had been born and raised in Alaska.
 Not surprisingly, he had forgotten most of the language from disuse, but we could nonetheless still carry on a limited conversation in CJ. 
 He told me that when he was younger, it was used extensively and interchangably with English among the fishermen, woodsmen and general population where he grew up.His mother and father and grandparents commonly used it too, he said.  He was disabled but healthy and bright and had a good sense of humor. (For the record, he appeared to be of mainly, if not pure, European ancestry, as did his son). 
 If he's still alive, and I imagine he is, you can probably add one more native speaker to the list. 
 Significantly, he was so happy to find another Chinook speaker that he gave me his last piece of pie.
 
Pasiuks 
 
 
Don duMas
The Blind Art Director
  
206-300-5368 mob
360-629-4283 ph/fx
don_dumas at yahoo.com

--- On Thu, 8/13/09, hzenk at PDX.EDU <hzenk at PDX.EDU> wrote:


From: hzenk at PDX.EDU <hzenk at PDX.EDU>
Subject: Re: estimate(s) of numbers of CJ speakers?
To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Date: Thursday, August 13, 2009, 2:40 PM


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
>> 
>> To respond to the CHINOOK list, click 'REPLY ALL'.  To respond privately to
>> the sender of a message, click 'REPLY'.  Hayu masi!
>> 
> 
> To respond to the CHINOOK list, click 'REPLY ALL'.  To respond privately to the sender of a message, click 'REPLY'.  Hayu masi!
> 

To respond to the CHINOOK list, click 'REPLY ALL'.  To respond privately to the sender of a message, click 'REPLY'.  Hayu masi!




      

To respond to the CHINOOK list, click 'REPLY ALL'.  To respond privately to the sender of a message, click 'REPLY'.  Hayu masi!
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