Chitimacha ( or , Sitimaxa) is a

language isolate A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. Basque in Europe, Ainu and Burushaski in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi ...

historically spoken by the Chitimacha people of

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, United States. It became extinct in 1940 with the death of the last fluent speaker, Delphine Ducloux. Although no longer spoken, it is fairly extensively documented in the early 20th-century work (mostly unpublished) of

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

Morris Swadesh Morris Swadesh ( ; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics, and developed his mature career at UNAM in Mexico. Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewi ...

and John R. Swanton. Swadesh in particular wrote a full grammar and dictionary, and collected numerous texts from the last two speakers, although none of this is published.

Language revitalization Language revitalization, also referred to as language revival or reversing language shift, is an attempt to halt or reverse the decline of a language or to revive an extinct one. Those involved can include linguists, cultural or community group ...

efforts are underway to teach the language to a new generation of speakers. Tribal members have received

Rosetta Stone The Rosetta Stone is a stele of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a Rosetta Stone decree, decree issued in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty of ancient Egypt, Egypt, on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts ...

software for learning the language. As of 2015, a new Chitimacha dictionary is in preparation, and classes are being taught on the Chitimacha reservation.

Classification

Chitimacha has recently been proposed to be related to, or a member of, the hypothetical Totozoquean language family. An automated computational analysis ( ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013) found lexical similarities between Chitimacha, Huave, and Totozoquean. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance. An earlier, more speculative, proposal suggested an affinity with the also hypothetical group of

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Phonology

Brown, Wichmann, and Beck (2014) give the following phoneme inventory based on

's 1939 analysis.

Orthography

Transcription has been done by researchers in a number of orthographies, including French, Spanish, and Americanist. Members of the Chitimacha tribe have developed a practical orthography using the Latin alphabet which does not use diacritics or special characters. It retains elements of the orthography earlier used by Morris Swadesh.

Grammar

Chitimacha has a grammatical structure which is not dissimilar from modern Indo-European languages but it is still quite distinctive. Chitimacha distinguishes several word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives (verbal and nominal), quantifiers, demonstratives. Swadesh (1946) states that the remaining word classes are hard to distinguish but may be divided "into proclitics, postclitics, and independent particles". Chitimacha has auxiliaries which are inflected for tense, aspect and mood, such as ''to be''. Polar interrogatives may be marked with a final falling intonation and a clause final post-position. Chitimacha does not appear to have adopted any grammatical features from their interactions with the French, Spanish or Americans.

Pronouns

Verbs are inflected for person and number of the subject. Ambiguity may be avoided by the use of the personal pronouns (shown in the table below), but sentences without personal pronouns are common. There is no

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in the personal pronouns and verbal indexes. Subject and object personal pronouns are identical. Pronouns are more restricted than nouns when appearing in a possessive construction. Pronouns cannot be proceeded by a possessive unlike nouns.

Nouns

There are definite articles in Chitimacha. Nouns are mostly uninflected; there are only approximately 30 nouns (mostly kinship or referring to persons) which distinguish a singular or plural form through a plural suffix or other formations. Nouns are free, or may be possessed by juxtaposing the possessor and the possessed noun. :ʔiš ʔinž̹i = my father ("I father") :was ʔasi ʔinž̹i = that man's father ("that man father")

Sample text

The following sentences and translations are from the book "Modern Chitimacha (Sitimaxa)" (2008), endorsed by the Chitimata Tribal government's Cultural Department.

References

External links

OLAC resources in and about the Chitimacha language
{{North American languages Chitimacha Language isolates of North America Languages of the United States Extinct languages of North America Indigenous languages of the North American Southeast Native American language revitalization Languages extinct in the 1940s 1940 disestablishments in Louisiana Languages of Louisiana