Boontling is a jargon or argot based on English, spoken in and around Boonville, California. Boontling was created in the 1890s and spoken most widely just before World War I. It gained attention in the 1960s and 1970s from published research and television appearances by Boontling speakers. By 2025 the lingo no longer had any fluent speakers, though it is still used recreationally and for advertising.
History
Origin and spread
thumb|A sign indicating Boonville, California.
Boontling was created in the late 19th century in the isolated Anderson Valley in Mendocino County, California, a sparsely populated farming, ranching and logging region. Boonville (Boontling "Boont") was and still is its largest town.
Several different stories are told of who created Boontling: women and children working in the hop fields, children who wanted to speak freely in front of elders without being understood (Myrtle Rawles cites an informant who credited Ed "Squirrel" Clement and Lank McGimsey with making up the first Boontling words in the summer of 1890), and being interviewed for or writing articles on the language in San Francisco newspapers. Boontling was first mentioned in a scholarly publication in 1942. Lynwood Carranco and Wilma Rawles Simmons published the first lengthy scholarly article on Boontling in 1964. Area resident Myrtle Rawles documented the language in her 1966 article and 1967 book based on interviews of family and neighbors. Researcher Charles C. Adams wrote his 1967 doctoral dissertation and a 1971 book, which included an extensive dictionary, on the lingo.
Boontling briefly enjoyed a national audience in the mid-1970s when a Boontling speaker named Bobby "Chipmunk" Glover was a regular guest with Johnny Carson on the well-known Tonight Show. Jack June appeared on the game show To Tell the Truth. The last prominent fluent speaker, Wes Smoot, died in 2024.
Today Boontling can be seen in the Anderson Valley History Museum (and sometimes heard at events there), on the billboards at the north and south ends of the valley that welcome visitors, in the names of the Anderson Valley Brewing Company's beers and in its advertising, in the names of the Breggo and Bee Hunter wineries and wines such as Handley Cellars' Brightlighter and Foursight Wines' Paraboll, and in the names of Pennyroyal Farms' cheeses.
Uses
Every Boontling speaker's first language was English. Boontling would be spoken instead of English for many purposes: to conceal conversation from non-speakers or less-skilled speakers, perhaps older, younger or of the opposite sex than the speaker;