Muskogean ( ; also Muskhogean) is a

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ...

spoken in the

Southeastern United States The Southeastern United States, also known as the American Southeast or simply the Southeast, is a geographical List of regions in the United States, region of the United States located in the eastern portion of the Southern United States and t ...

. Members of the family are

Indigenous Languages of the Americas The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now e ...

. Typologically, Muskogean languages are highly

synthetic Synthetic may refer to: Science * Synthetic biology * Synthetic chemical or compound, produced by the process of chemical synthesis * Synthetic elements, chemical elements that are not naturally found on Earth and therefore have to be created in ...

and

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...

. One documented language,

Apalachee The Apalachee were an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, specifically an Indigenous people of Florida, who lived in the Florida Panhandle until the early 18th century. They lived between the Aucilla River and Ochlockonee River,Bobby ...

, is no longer spoken, and the remaining languages are critically endangered.

Genetic relationships

Family division

The Muskogean family consists of

Alabama Alabama ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Deep South, Deep Southern regions of the United States. It borders Tennessee to the north, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gu ...

Chickasaw The Chickasaw ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, United States. Their traditional territory was in northern Mississippi, northwestern and northern Alabama, western Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky. Their language is ...

Choctaw The Choctaw ( ) people are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States, originally based in what is now Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The Choctaw language is a Western Muskogean language. Today, Choct ...

Muscogee The Muscogee, also known as the Mvskoke, Muscogee Creek or just Creek, and the Muscogee Creek Confederacy ( in the Muscogee language; English: ), are a group of related Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands Here they waged war again ...

(or Creek), Koasati,

, and

Hitchiti-Mikasuki The Mikasuki, Hitchiti-Mikasuki, or Hitchiti language is a language or a pair of dialects or closely related languages that belong to the Muskogean languages family. , Mikasuki was spoken by around 290 people in southern Florida. Along with the Co ...

. Hitchiti is generally considered a dialect of Mikasuki. "Seminole" is sometimes used for a dialect of Muscogee spoken in Oklahoma. The major subdivisions of the family have long been controversial, but the following lower-level groups are universally accepted: Choctaw–Chickasaw, Alabama–Koasati, Hitchiti–Mikasuki, and Muscogee. Apalachee is no longer spoken; its precise relationship to the other languages is uncertain, but Mary Haas and Pamela Munro both classify it with the Alabama–Koasati group.

Haas's classification

For connections among these groupings, one influential classification is that of Mary Haas and Karen Booker, in which "Western Muskogean" (Choctaw-Chickasaw) is seen as one major branch, and "Eastern Muskogean" (Alabama-Koasati, Hitchiti-Mikasuki, and Muscogee) as another. Within Eastern Muskogean, Alabama-Koasati and Hitchiti-Mikasuki are generally thought to be more closely related to each other than to Muscogee.Hardy 2005, pp. 70-71 That classification is reflected in the list below: * Muskogean ** Western Muskogean ***

***

(also called Chahta, Chacato) ** Eastern Muskogean ***

(also called Muskogee, Maskoke, Mvskoke, Seminole, and Creek) ***

(also called Miccosukee) *** Apalachee–Alabama–Koasati ****

****

(also called Alibamu) **** Koasati (also called Coushatta)

Munro's classification

A different classification has been proposed by Pamela Munro. In her classification, the languages are divided into a "Southern Muskogean" branch (Choctaw-Chickasaw, Alabama-Koasati, and Hitchiti-Mikasuki) and a "Northern Muskogean" one (Muscogee). Southern Muskogean is then subdivided into Hitchiti-Mikasuki and a "Southwestern Muskogean" branch containing Alabama-Koasati and "Western Muskogean" (Choctaw-Chickasaw). The classification is reflected in the list below:Campbell 1997, p. 148 * Muskogean ** Northern Muskogean ***

** Southern Muskogean ***

*** Southwestern Muskogean ****

**** ''Alabama–Koasati'' *****

***** Koasati **** ''Western Muskogean'' *****

*****

Broader relationships

Possible Muskogean languages

Several sparsely attested languages have been claimed to be Muskogean languages. George Broadwell suggested that the languages of the Yamasee and Guale were Muskogean.Campbell 1997, p. 149 However, William Sturtevant argued that the "Yamasee" and "Guale" data were Muscogee and that the language(s) spoken by the Yamasee and Guale people remain unknown. It is possible that the Yamasee were an amalgamation of several different ethnic groups and did not speak a single language. Chester B. DePratter describes the Yamasee as consisting mainly of speakers of Hitchiti and Guale. The historian Steven Oatis also describes the Yamasee as an ethnically mixed group that included people from Muskogean-speaking regions, such as the early colonial-era native towns of ''Hitchiti'', ''Coweta'', and ''Cussita''. The Amacano, Chacato, Chine, Pacara, and

Pensacola Pensacola ( ) is a city in the Florida panhandle in the United States. It is the county seat and only city in Escambia County. The population was 54,312 at the 2020 census. It is the principal city of the Pensacola metropolitan area, which ha ...

people, who lived along the Gulf Coast of Florida from the Big Bend Coast to Pensacola Bay, are reported to have spoken the same Muskogean language, which may have been closely related to Choctaw. Sparse evidence indicates that a Muskogean language was spoken by at least some of the people of the paramount chiefdom of Cofitachequi in northeastern

South Carolina South Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders North Carolina to the north and northeast, the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast, and Georgia (U.S. state), Georg ...

. If so, that would be the most eastern outpost of Muskogean. The people of Cofitichequi were probably absorbed by nearby Siouan and

Iroquoian The Iroquoian languages () are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking. As of 2020, almost all surviving I ...

speakers in the late 17th century. A vocabulary of the Houma may be another underdocumented Western Muskogean language or a version of

Mobilian Jargon Mobilian Jargon (also Mobilian trade language, Mobilian Trade Jargon, Chickasaw–Choctaw trade language, Yamá) was a pidgin used as a lingua franca among Native American groups living along the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico around the time ...

, a pidgin based on Western Muskogean.

Gulf

The best-known connection proposed between Muskogean and other languages is Mary Haas' Gulf hypothesis, in which she conceived of a macrofamily comprising Muskogean and a number of

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 ...

s of the southeastern US: Atakapa, Chitimacha, Tunica, and Natchez. While well-known, the Gulf grouping is now generally rejected by historical linguists. Some Muskogean scholars continue to believe that Muskogean is related to Natchez.

Features

Nouns

Nouns in Muskogean languages may take prefixes indicating the person and number of a possessor. Noun phrases may be marked for

grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a Nominal group (functional grammar), n ...

, with a distinction between subjects (nominative case) and nonsubjects (oblique case). Some Muskogean languages have affixes indicating plural nouns (generally human nouns) or groups.

Verbs

Muskogean verbs are highly synthetic, with affixes for tense, aspect, person, number, direction, and mood. While case marking is nominative–accusative, person marking is active–stative, with separate series of agent, patient, and indirect object person markers. Verbs have a complex system of

ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut ( , from German ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its relate ...

indicating aspect. In Muskogean linguistics, the different forms are known as "grades" or "themes". All the languages make use of suppletive verbs indicating the number of the subject in an intransitive verb or the number of the direct object in a transitive verb. Innately-numbered verbal stems, Mikasuki:

Vocabulary

Below is a list of basic vocabulary in five Muskogean languages from Broadwell (1992):

Proto-language

Phonology

Proto-Muskogean is reconstructed as having the consonants (given in IPA transcription): The phonemes reconstructed by Haas as and show up as and (or ), respectively, in all Muskogean languages; they are therefore reconstructed by some as and . appears as in all the daughter languages except

for which it is initially and medially. The value of the proto-phoneme conventionally written (or ) is unknown; it appears as in Western Muskogean languages and as in Eastern Muskogean languages. Haas reconstructed it as a voiceless (that is, ), based partly on presumed cognates in Natchez.Booker 2005, pp. 251–52

Lexicon

Proto-Muskogean lexical reconstructions by Booker (2005) are as follows.

Notes

External links

Muskogean Language Family
page at native-languages.org
Chickasaw Language Information & Videos
- Chickasaw.TV

Bibliography

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Reconstructing Proto-Muskogean Language and Prehistory: Preliminary Results
'' (PDF). Paper presented at the Southern Anthropological Society, St. Augustine, FL. Retrieved on 2009-05-03. * Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America''. New York: Oxford University Press. . *Coker, William S. (1999) "Pensacola, 1686–1821." in Judith Anne Bense. (1999) Editor. ''Archaeology of colonial Pensacola.'' University Press of Florida. Found a
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* Crawford, James M. (Ed.). (1975a). ''Studies in Southeastern Indian Languages''. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. * Crawford, James M. (1975b). "Southeastern Indian Languages". In Crawford (ed.) 1975, pp. 1–120. * Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). ''Languages''. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. . * Haas, Mary (1951). "The Proto-Gulf word for water (with notes on Siouan–Yuchi)". ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 17: 71–79. * Haas, Mary. (1952). "The Proto-Gulf word for 'land' (with notes on Proto-Siouan)". ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 18:238–240. * Haas, Mary. (1973). "The Southeast". In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), ''Linguistics in North America'' (part 2, pp. 1210–1249). The Hague: Mouton. * Hardy, Heather. (2005). "Introduction". In Hardy & Scancarelli 2005, pp. 69–74. * Hardy, Heather & Janine Scancarelli. (2005). ''Native Languages of the Southeastern United States''. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. *Hopkins, Nicholas A.
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' (PDF). Report for the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. Retrieved on 2009-05-03. *Martin, Jack B. (2004). "Languages." In Raymond D. Fogelson ed., Handbook of North American Indians. The Southeast, 68–86. * Martin, Jack B. (2023) "Muskogean." ''The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America'' Vol. 13.2, pp. 1577–1600 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jackb-martin/11/ * Martin, Jack B. & Pamela Munro. (2005). "Proto-Muskogean Morphology". in Hardy & Scancarelli eds., pp. 299–320 *Milanich, Jerald T. (1995). ''Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe''. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. * Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); . * Sebeok, Thomas A. (Ed.). (1973). ''Linguistics in North America'' (parts 1 & 2). Current trends in linguistics (Vol. 10). The Hague: Mouton. (Reprinted as Sebeok 1976). * Sturtevant, William C. (Ed.). (1978–present). ''Handbook of North American Indians'' (Vol. 1–20). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. (Vols. 1–3, 16, 18–20 not yet published). * Sturtevant, William C. (1994). "The Misconnection of Guale and Yamasee with Muskogean". ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 60:139–148. *Swanton, John Reed. (1952) ''The Indian Tribes of North America.'' Found a
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