There are reportedly only about a dozen speakers of Boontling left.
The dialect from the area around the small Mendocino County town of Boonville consists of more than 1,500 words, many of them drawn from local names. A phone booth, for example, is a "buckey walter," because a century ago someone named Walter had the first phone in the area and charged a nickel -- then called a buckeye -- to use it. Other words are variations of existing nouns.
The exact origins of Boontling are not known, but linguistics experts say only Appalachian English in the Southeastern U.S. is similar in scope.