Kathlamet was a Chinookan language

Chinookan languages

Chinookan is a small family of languages spoken in Oregon and Washington along the Columbia River by Chinook peoples.-Family division:Chinookan languages consists of three languages with multiple varieties. There is some dispute over classification, and there are two ISO 639-3 codes assigned: and...

 that was spoken around the border of Washington and Oregon

Oregon

Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...

. The most extensive records of the language were made by Franz Boas

Franz Boas

Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...

, and a grammar was documented in the dissertation of Dell Hymes

Dell Hymes

Dell Hathaway Hymes was a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics"...

. It became extinct in the 1930s and there is little text left of it.

Kathlamet was spoken in northwestern Oregon along the south bank of the lower Columbia River. It has been classified as a dialect of Upper Chinook, or as Lower Chinook

Lower Chinook

Lower Chinook, also simple Chinook or Chinook proper, is a highly endangered language of the US Pacific Northwest.-Dialects:* Clatsop was spoken in northwestern Oregon around the mouth of the Columbia River and the Clatsop Plains .* Shoalwater , now extinct ...

, but was mutually intelligible

Mutual intelligibility

In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is recognized as a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand each other without intentional study or extraordinary effort...

with neither.

Further reading

• Boas, Franz. Kathlamet Texts. Washington, DC: Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology #26, 1901
• Hymes, Dell H.The Language of Kathlamet Chinook. (doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, 1955)