Chinooks

Chinooks, a tribe of Indians, now nearly extinct, on the Columbia River on the west coast of North America. Their language was very difficult to learn and to pronounce, and this led to the formation of the Chinook jargon, a trader's lingua franca, consisting of words from French, English, and Hawaiian, as well as Chinook and other Indian tongues. See the dictionary by Gibbs (1863) and the monograph by H. Hale (1890).