Boontling: An American Lingo With a Dictionary of Boontling

by Charles C. Adams

"Boontling is the name given by its speakers to a local language spoken extensively between 1880 and 1920 in Boonville, the largest town in the upper Anderson Valley of Mendocino County, California. The name itself is a typical word in the jargon. In its heyday the language was widely used by the valley's inhabitants, to the confusion of outsiders." The book includes a history of the language, vocabulary resources, names of people, names of places, phonemic reshaping, a Boontling dictionary, and more. The book also includes historic photographic images from the Boontling era.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 1971

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See:

Charles C(hristopher) Adams, Zoologist

Reviews

[H. Lynch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boontling is one of the very few post-colonial American lingos to develop. It's heyday was the early part of the 20th century and was confined to a tiny isogloss in and around California's Anderson Valley. Few people speak it any more, but vestiges of it exist on old signs and among the oldest living inhabitants of the region. This book is a joy if you are a geek about linguistics, local history, the investigative research process, and learning about a colorful group of frontiersmen, their families, and the conditions that allowed their lingo to flourish for a few short decades.

[Clay · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is well written, but the Boontling slang itself isn't very interesting (even to a word nerd like me).