Eskimo Trade Jargon

Eskimo Trade Jargon formed from one the two "pidgin traditions" formed between Inuit peoples and foreign whalers as they interacted, likely helped by the difficulty europeans had learning Inuit languages. The pidgin is recorded to have been used during the 19th and 20th centuries as American ships with international crews traveled to The North American Artctic. Because the international crews often spoke several different languages, but they all had to interact with the Inuit, the Inuit's language ended up the becoming the main lexifier of Eskimo Trade Jargon. The pidgin went extinct sometime in the 20th century though some rememberers may remain.^[3][4]

As Eskimo Trade Pidgin emerged in several locations simultaneously the various areas it emerged in had different dialects of the pidgin. These dialects included: Herschel Island Pidgin, Point Barrow Pidgin, Kotzebue Pidgin, and Point Hope pidgin. While Eskimo Trade Jargon was similar to Slavey Jargon it was different enough that there wasn't enough mutual intelligibility to allow for communication between the two pidgins.^[3]

In Eskimo Trade Jargon verbs and nouns cannot be distinguished via morphology, and they can sometimes not even semantically. An example being the word kaukau which means both ‘to eat’ and ‘food’. In Eskimo Trade Jargon the meaning of phrases is extremely context dependant and vague. Often times subjects are not expressed expressly, and the translation of the statement depends on the context.^[4]

The Lexicon of ETJ is very diverse, while most words are from either an Inuit language or English words from other languages are found. Of all the Inuit languages the one with the most vocabulary in ETJ is North Slope dialect of Iñupiaq. Other contributing languages include Hawaiian Pidgin, Chinook Jargon, Danish, Portuguese, and possibly Old Icelandic.^[4]

Words would often undergo significant changes after being loaned into Eskimo Trade Jargon, making them unrecognizable from their original forms. Examples being the words u' ra and pau' from the English words Rice and powder respectively.^[3]