Natchez language
| Natchez | |
|---|---|
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma |
| Ethnicity | Natchez people |
| Extinct | 1965 |
| Revival | 6 (2011) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | natc1249 |
Pre-contact distribution of the Natchez language
|
|
Natchez is the ancestral language of the Natchez people who historically inhabited Mississippi and Louisiana, and who now mostly live among the Creek and Cherokee peoples in Oklahoma. The language is either considered to be unrelated to other Indigenous languages of the Americas or distantly related to the Muskogean languages.
The phonology of the Natchez language is atypical in having voicing distinction in its sonorants but not in its obstruents; it also has a wide range of morphophonemic processes. Morphologically, it has complex verbal inflection and a relatively simple nominal inflection (ergative case marking on nouns in transitive clauses), and its syntax is characterized by active-stative alignment and subject-object-verb word order (or more accurately Agent-Object-Verb and Subject-Verb). Natchez storytellers used a specific register, "cannibal speech", when impersonating cannibals, a recurring character in Natchez oral literature.
The Natchez chiefdom was destroyed in the 1730s by the French; Natchez speakers took refuge among their neighbors and accompanied them when they were eventually driven to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. This history meant that Natchez speakers were frequently multilingual in Creek, Cherokee, Natchez and English, and the language gradually became endangered, and is now generally considered extinct, in spite of recent revitalization efforts. What is known of the language comes mostly from its last fluent speakers, Watt Sam and Nancy Raven, who worked with linguist Mary R. Haas in the 1930s. The Natchez nation is now working to revive it as a spoken language. As of 2011, field linguists from the community were being trained in documentation techniques, and six members of the Natchez tribe in Oklahoma now speak the language, out of about 10,000.
...
Wikipedia