All Over The Map: Is Umpqua pronounced UMP-kwuh or UMP-kwah?
Nov 1, 2024, 10:18 AM | Updated: 2:17 pm
The Umpqua River is in southern Oregon north of Coos Bay, as seen on this 1948 nautical chart. (NOAA Archives)
(NOAA Archives)
This week, we take a deep and highly pedantic dive into the name of a Pacific Northwest bank that also happens to be the name of a river in Oregon – and sponsor of the Seahawks’ radio broadcasts.
The “pedantic” part is something of an overstatement. The topic is the pronunciation of the name “Umpqua.” In print, this name goes back about 200 years, and comes originally from the anglicization of a word from an Indigenous language spoken around what’s now the Pacific Coast for millennia.
Thus, if we take the time to learn how to say them correctly and respectfully, pronunciation of place names can be part of a priceless link in an unbroken – yet, because of the anglicization, imperfect – linguistic chain to the distant past, long before any Europeans came. That’s a big responsibility and the kind of thing we try to take seriously here at All Over The Map headquarters.
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It all begins with last Sunday’s awful Seahawks game against Detroit. Anyone listening to the broadcast on KIRO Newsradio or Seattle Sports 710 AM heard this from Steve Raible a few moments before the action got underway.
“When we come back, kickoff time here at Lumen Field. Stand by,” Raible said. “You’re listening to the Umpqua Bank Radio Network.”
Raible pronounced “Umpqua” so it sounded like “UMP-kwuh,” which is the way many people around Puget Sound have always said it, too.
The name “Umpqua” was applied to a river and a river valley in what’s now southern Oregon in the early 19th century. The river enters the Pacific Ocean just north of Coos Bay, Oregon. Reedsport is the town nearest the ocean on the banks of the Umpqua River.
In more recent years, the name “Umpqua” has also been applied to a community, a lighthouse, a museum, a brand of ice cream and to Umpqua Bank. The bank is the new naming sponsor this season for the radio network that carries Seahawks games to six states and two Canadian provinces.
This sponsorship is the reason why Steve Raible said what he said, and why an announcer said this during that same Seahawks broadcast about three minutes later:
“Seahawks Football is brought to you by Umpqua Bank,” the announcer intoned, “proud partner of the Seattle Seahawks.”
But this time, the announcer guy said “Umpqua” so it sounded like “UMP-kwah.”
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Umpqua Bank was founded in Oregon in the 1950s and is headquartered in the community of Lake Oswego. In 2023, Umpqua Bank merged with Tacoma-based Columbia Bank and all the branches of Columbia were rebranded as Umpqua.
An email sent Thursday morning by KIRO Newsradio to the Umpqua Bank media relations team seeking pronunciation guidance has so far gone unanswered. However, there are ample clues online and in the outgoing messages of official Umpqua Bank phone numbers.
Unfortunately, official Umpqua Bank audio – on YouTube and on their outgoing phone messages – use both pronunciations, UMP-kwuh and UMP-kwah. The same is true of some of the other entities named Umpqua; there’s not much to be found in the way of consistency.
For the record, there is at least one printed source of pronunciation guidance for Oregon place names. “Pronunciation Guide of Oregon Place Names” is a booklet published in 1961 by the Oregon Association of Broadcasters. On page 74, it says the correct pronunciation is “UMP-kwaw.”
A phone call to a number listed for Umpqua National Forest was answered by Cynthia Letts, a Bureau of Land Management employee who works at an interagency communication center in nearby Roseburg, Oregon.
Letts earned a Master’s Degree in Intercultural Communications and confirmed that “UMP-kwah” (or “UMP-kwaw”) is the correct pronunciation, if not exactly how it would have been pronounced by Indigenous people before Europeans arrived.
“That would be the Coos pronunciation,” Letts explained. “The Indigenous peoples didn’t have a written language, and so what was written down was (what was perceived) phonetically by the English” – specifically, employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Letts said, describing the process of anglicization mentioned above.
Also, according to McArthur’s “Oregon Geographic Names,” it was explorers such as David Douglas and Peter Skene Ogden who were among the first non-Indigenous people to travel in that area and then write their own distinctive phonetic versions of Umpqua, while attaching that name to geographical features.
“So, how you and I would pronounce the word ‘Umpqua’ is as exactly as the English perceived it to be heard,” Letts said, not the original or true Indigenous pronunciation.
Patty Phillips is a linguist who has studied Indigenous languages in Oregon and California.
“I grew up in southwestern Oregon, so I’m pretty familiar with the name Umpqua, and I’ve studied linguistics and the regional languages,” Phillips told KIRO Newsradio
“Here (in southern Oregon) in contemporary English, locals tend to pronounce it ‘UMP-kwah,'” Phillips explained. “I mean, I don’t emphasize the ‘ah’ really heavily, and the stress tends to be a little bit on the first syllable, but it’s not like a heavy stress.”
The origins of “Umpqua,” says Phillips, are fairly complex, linguistically speaking – and even somewhat surprising.
“As I understand it, people have been trying to figure out where the word ‘Umpqua’ came from, because it’s a native word,” Phillips continued. “But there’s a lot of languages in southwestern Oregon, and language families, it’s very diverse.”
“The best that people have (been able to trace) it back to is the Roseburg area, to the Umpqua Valley,” Phillips said. The Indigenous people there “was a band that is commonly referred to as the Upper Umpqua. They were one of the Athabascan speaking bands, that’s a language family that includes the Navajo in Arizona and New Mexico, Apache, as well as a ton of languages up in Alaska and northern Canada. So it’s very distinct from other languages around it.”
Athabascan speakers, Phillips said, migrated to what’s now southern Oregon a few thousand years ago.
“I don’t know what sparked the migration, maybe a series of really bad winters,” Phillips said. “But whatever the cause, several people from Athabascan-speaking communities in the area, headed south and one branch wound up dog-legging a bit to the interior and became the Apache and Navajo peoples in the contemporary American Southwest and Oklahoma, and the other groups stuck a bit more towards the coast, and so a lot of them wound up in extreme southwestern Oregon, like the Upper Umpqua people in the Roseburg area, as well as people along the south coast and Curry County coastline into Northern California.”
That particular Upper Umpqua language is not one that Patty Phillips has studied, but she says that, generally speaking, Indigenous place names are “often pretty descriptive, something about the topography of the area, or sometimes named after a resource that’s in the area.”
Nowadays, live and local radio broadcasting is the closest thing we have to the oral tradition that predated the written and printed word around here. It’s a privilege and big responsibility for serious broadcasters, which is why we spend time trying to understand these sometimes esoteric topics.
Come Sunday, regardless of how many variations of “Umpqua” are heard over the airwaves, let’s hope we hear Steve Raible say “Touchdown Seahawks!” many, many times.
You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.
