Native to United States ISO 639-3 wac | Region Columbia River Glottolog wasc1239 | |
Extinct 2012
with the death of Gladys Thompson Language family Chinookan
Upper Chinook | ||
Upper Chinook, also known as Kiksht, 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.
The last fully fluent speaker of Kiksht, Gladys Thompson, died in 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.
Dialects
Kathlamet has been classified as an additional dialect; it was not mutually intelligible.