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Other comments: Natchez was originally
spoken near Natchez, Mississippi and in parts of Louisiana. Although
there some hypotheses have linked Natchez with Proto-Muskogean and some
of the other languages in the Gulf, to date the language is considered
an isolate, lacking any known linguistic relatives.
The Natchez language is the
ancestral language of the Natchez people who historically inhabited
Mississippi and Louisiana, and who now mostly live among the Muscogee
and Cherokee peoples in Oklahoma. The language is considered to be
either unrelated to other indigenous languages of the Americas or
distantly related to the Muskogean languages.
The phonology of Natchez 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 (the ergative case
marks 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).
The Natchez chiefdom was destroyed in the 1730s by the French; Natchez
speakers took refuge among their neighbors and accompanied them when the
U.S. federal government forcibly removed them to Indian Territory (now
Oklahoma) on the Trail of Tears. That meant that Natchez speakers were
frequently multilingual in Muscogee, Cherokee, Natchez, and English. The
language gradually became endangered, and it is now generally considered
extinct in spite of recent revitalization efforts. Much of 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.
The Natchez language is generally considered a language isolate. Mary
Haas studied the language with Sam and Raven in the 1930s, and posited
that Natchez was distantly related to the Muskogean languages, a
hypothesis also accepted by Geoffrey Kimball, and initially proposed by
John R. Swanton in 1924.
In 1941 Haas also proposed grouping Natchez with the Atakapa, Chitimacha,
and Tunica languages in a language family to be called Gulf. This
proposal has not been widely accepted today by linguists.
History: The Natchez people historically lived in the Lower Mississippi
Valley. The ancestors of the Natchez are considered to be the Plaquemine
culture, making the Natchez the last surviving group of the historical
Mississippian chiefdoms of that area. The first mentions in historical
sources come from the French who colonized the Mississippi Valley
beginning around 1700, when the Natchez were centered around the Grand
Village close to present day Natchez, Mississippi. The French and
Natchez were first allied, but hostilities gradually broke out as
colonists encroached on Natchez lands. The earliest sources for the
Natchez languages are the chronicles of Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz,
a French colonist who lived among the Natchez and learned their
language. His chronicles contain examples of Natchez as it was spoken in
the early 1700s. In 1729 the Natchez revolted, and massacred the French
colony of Fort Rosalie, and the French retaliated by destroying all the
Natchez villages. The remaining Natchez fled in scattered bands to live
among the Chickasaw, Creek and Cherokee, whom they followed on the trail
of tears when Indian removal policies of the mid 19th century forced
them to relocate to Oklahoma. In Oklahoma the language was mostly spoken
in Abihka and Notchietown. Most Natchez speakers were multilingual,
speaking also the Cherokee and Creek languages, and as traditionally the
Natchez language was generally passed down matrilineally, this led to a
decrease in Natchez speakers as Natchez, Muscogee and Cherokee speakers
intermarried.
In 1907 when anthropologist John R. Swanton visited the Natchez there
were seven fluent speakers left, but in the 1930s when linguist Mary R.
Haas did her fieldwork there were only two: Watt Sam (1876 - 1944) and
Nancy Raven (1872-1957). In 1931, anthropologist Victor Riste made
several wax cylinder recordings of Watt Sam speaking the Natchez
language, which were later rediscovered at the University of Chicago in
the 1970s by Watt Sam's nephew Archie Sam and linguist Charles Van Tuyl.
These are the only known recordings of spoken Natchez. One of the
cylinders is now at the Voice Library at Michigan State University.
Natchez is very little studied, apart from the work by Swanton and Haas
and the early mentions by the French Chroniclers, Natchez has been
discussed by Daniel Garrison Brinton who published an article "On the
Language of the Natchez" in 1873, and is briefly mentioned by Albert
Gallatin and Albert Pike. A vocabulary compiled based on the French
sources was published by Charles van Tuyl in 1979.In the early 21st
century linguistic work has been carried out by the linguist Geoffrey
Kimball, who has worked based on Haas' notes and unpublished
manuscripts.
Natchez
has only recorded traditional numerals from 1 to 10 many years ago,
not sure if they were used a traditional decimal or vigesimal system
before, New data for numbers after ten is required. |