The most extensive records of the language were made by Franz Boas, and a grammar was documented in the dissertation of Dell Hymes.
Kathlamet was spoken in northwestern Oregon along the south bank of the lower Columbia River.
Kathlamet lacks many of the distinguishing features found among the dialects of Upper Chinook including extensive use of sound symbolism, pervasive intervocalic voicing of consonants, and an elaborate tense prefix system.
It also features a different collection of initial nominal prefixes and some additional morphemes, such as independent pronouns.
Kathlamet has four major word classes: pronouns, nouns, verbs, and articles.
Unlike noun and pronoun words, verb may show more than one occurrence of the paradigm.
The number of occurrences ranges from one to three mostly by relative order position, partly by special forms.
Nouns stem belonging to a joint class, such as VN, NP and VNP.
For example: Ewā’thustgā’q¡aqstakukstheir headsaqō’lᴇktcaare roastedagᴇ’kikalmy wifeantā’ʟxanaour smelts[7] Ewā’ tgā’q¡aqstakuks aqō’lᴇktca {agᴇ’kikal} antā’ʟxanathus {their heads} {are roasted} {my wife} {our smelts}"The heads of our smelts (those of my wife and me) are roasted"Kathlamet shows a four-way tense distinction: The suffix –tiX relation to time and –pa relation to space.
The Lower Chinook people were reduced to a handful of survivors by epidemics in 1829, resulting in the loss of their distinct languages and their disappearance as a clan entity.
In fact, Wasco-Wishram is the only surviving branch of the entire Chinookan language family.
The final native speaker of Wasco, Gladys Thompson, died in 2012, but not before the language was passed down in part to Deanie Johnson and Val Switzler, both members of the Warm Springs Indian reservation.
Both began providing instruction in Wasco-Wishram to other members of the tribe in 2006, but neither Johnson nor Switzler is considered fully fluent.
The last fully fluent speakers of the Wishram dialect, meanwhile, lived in the Yakima reservation in Washington State; all died sometime between 2000 and 2013.
The use and demise of the other Chinookan dialects is too poorly documented to determine when they were last spoken, but collections of text and some grammatical treatments remain, most notably for Shoalwater, Kathlamet, and Clackamas.
"Honors Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs elder Gladys Miller Thompson for her contribution to preserving Native languages of Oregon.".