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Upper Chinook language

Upper Chinook, endonym Kiksht,^[2] also known as Columbia Chinook, and Wasco-Wishram after its last surviving dialect, is a recently extinct language of the US Pacific Northwest. It had 69 speakers in 1990, of whom 7 were monolingual: five Wasco^[3] and two Wishram. In 2001, there were five remaining speakers of Wasco.^[4]

The last fully fluent speaker of Kiksht, Gladys Thompson, died in July 2012.^[1] She had been honored for her work by the Oregon Legislature in 2007.^[5][6][7] Two new speakers were teaching Kiksht at the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in 2006.^[8] The Northwest Indian Language Institute of the University of Oregon formed a partnership to teach Kiksht and Numu in the Warm Springs schools.^[9][10] Audio and video files of Kiksht are available at the Endangered Languages Archive.^[11]

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.^[12]

• Multnomah, once spoken on Sauvie Island and in the Portland 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 [Curtis]).
  • Hood River, now extinct (spoken by the Hood River Band of the Hood River Wasco in Oregon, also known as Ninuhltidih [Curtis] or Kwikwulit [Mooney])
  • 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.

Vowels in Kiksht are as follows: /u a i ɛ ə/.

• Sapir, Edward; Curtin, Jeremiah (1909). Wishram texts, together with Wasco tales and myths. E.J. Brill. ASIN: B000855RIW.
• Dyk, Walter (1933). A Grammar of Wishram. New Haven: Yale University: Yale University Press.

• Nariyo Kono. "Conversational Kiksht". Endangered Languages Archive. Retrieved 2013-02-25.
• Kiksht - Washco Wishram - Upper Chinook videos, YouTube
• Wasco-Wishram Indian Language (Upper Chinook, Kiksht, Clackamas) at native-languages.org
• Digital Kiksht, video about digitizing Kiksht language materials
• Audio of spoken Kiksht