Upper Chinook language
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. 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.
Upper Chinook | |
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Kiksht | |
Native to | United States |
Region | Columbia River |
Extinct | 11 July 2012 with the death of Gladys Thompson |
Chinookan
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Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | wac |
Glottolog | wasc1239 |
ELP | Wasco-Wishram |
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 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.