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]

Dialects

• 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.

Phonology

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