Many words from Chinook Jargon remain in common use in the Western United States and British Columbia today and it has been described as part of a multicultural heritage shared by the modern inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest. The total number of Jargon words in published lexicons numbered only in the hundreds, and so it was easy to learn. It has its own grammatical system, but a very simple one that, like its word list, was easy to learn. Though existent in Chinook Jargon, the consonant is rare, and English and French loan words, such as "rice" and , have changed in their adoption to the Jargon, to and , respectively.