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CHAPTER 1
The Chitimacha Language: A History
.
e history of the Chitimacha language is a remarkable story of cultural
survival. is chapter tells a part of that story, discussing the interactions
between Chitimacha and other languages in the Southeast prior to colonial
contact, the persecution of the Chitimacha people under the French, the lan-
guage’s documentation by early linguists and anthropologists, and finally its
modern revitalization.
Chitimacha is a language isolate—that is, unrelated to any other known
languages—spoken in the present-day town of Charenton, Louisiana, on the
Bayou Teche. Formerly it was spoken over the entire region from the Mis-
sissippi River in the east to Vermillion Bay in the west (see figure .). By the
time the Chitimacha people first appear in the historic record in (Margry
:), they had already suffered drastic depopulation, in large part as a
consequence of European diseases that had spread outward from Spanish
Florida in the early s (ornton ). At the time of contact with the
French in , an estimated three thousand Chitimacha people remained
(Mooney :; Swanton :). Beginning in , Louis Juchereau de
St. Denis began a series of unauthorized raids on villages in Grand Terre to
obtain captives to sell to French colonists at Mobile. Distrust for the French
grew among the Chitimacha, culminating in the murder of Jesuit mission-
ary Jean-François Buisson de Saint-Cosme in . In retaliation, Governor
Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville sent French Canadians and tribal allies
in the region to attack the Chitimacha, the first in a series of attacks on the
Chitimacha that continued intermittently until a peace accord (Swanton
:–). As a result of the many Chitimacha people taken captive during
the war, the majority of enslaved people in early colonial Louisiana were Chiti-
macha (Swanton :). By , only a few hundred Chitimacha survived,
with an estimated one hundred males living at Bayou Plaquemine in present
.
Iberville Parish (Rowland and Sanders :) and a few hundred more
people living along the Bayou Teche (see Hoover :). General population
decline continued through the nineteenth century, so that by the early s,
only about fiy Chitimacha (among them just a handful of native speakers)
remained, situated at the present-day town of Charenton on the Bayou Teche
(Gatschet ; Swanton ).
is state of affairs caused Chief Benjamin Paul (–), one of the last
two fluent speakers of Chitimacha, to despair of the future of his language even
as he worked with linguist Morris Swadesh in the early s to record tradi-
tional stories: “ere were (more) stories about the west, but I have forgotten.
I do not know how they begin. ere were very many stories about the west.
. . . I believe I am doing well. I have not forgotten everything yet. When I die,
you will not hear that sort of thing again” (Swadesh d:).
Chief Paul died in , leaving his niece, Delphine Ducloux (–)
as the last fluent speaker of Chitimacha. Ducloux passed away in , leav-
ing just a handful of elderly basket weavers who continued to use Chitimacha
terminology for their weaving.
In , however, the tribe received a delivery from the Library of Congress
containing copies of wax cylinder recordings in the language, which Swadesh
recorded via Dictaphone with Paul and Ducloux in the s (Swadesh ).
is was the first time that the language had been heard in decades. Accord-
ing to Chitimacha cultural director Kimberly S. Walden, “e recordings were
very hard to understand, especially if you’d never heard the language spoken
before. You have to realize that, as long as I was growing up, all we had [of
Chitimacha] was a few words on a museum brochure that no one could pro-
nounce” (Rosetta Stone ).
Figure 1.1. Map of traditional territories of the Chitimacha, Washa, and Chawasha people.
The Washa and Chawasha also spoke a variety of Chitimacha. Map from Swanton 1911,
plate 1, frontispiece.
:
Alongside the original wax cylinders stored in the American Philosophical
Society Library were Swadesh’s field notes and dra grammar, dictionary, and
text collection in the language—more than one thousand pages of materials
in all (Swadesh , c). e tribe soon initiated the Chitimacha Lan-
guage Restoration Program. In , under Walden’s leadership, the program
developed daily language classes at the tribal elementary school as well as a
preschool language program and worked with the soware company Rosetta
Stone to produce language-learning soware (Abramson ; Bittinger ;
Hieber ). Each of the approximately one thousand registered tribe mem-
bers today has free access to the soware.
In addition, the recent availability of digital copies of archival materials
has facilitated a wave of new research on the language. ough Chitimacha
featured prominently in the linguistic and anthropological literature in the
first half of the twentieth century as a result of Swadesh’s fieldwork and that
of his predecessor John R. Swanton (Swanton , ; Swadesh , a,
a), the language received little attention again until the twenty-first cen-
tury. In the past decade or so, however, Chitimacha has been discussed in
several overviews of the languages of the Americas (Mithun ; Waldman
) and the US Southeast (Brightman ; Martin ; Goddard )
and has been the focus of several theses (Weinberg ; Iannucci ). A
recent proposal (though not widely accepted) also suggested a long-distance
genetic relationship with Mesoamerican languages (Brown, Wichmann, and
Beck ). Numerous studies have examined various aspects of Chitimacha
grammar and diachrony, including the development of its class of preverbs
(Hieber a, , forthcoming), its system of verbal person marking and
agent-patient alignment (Hieber forthcoming), the structure of Chitimacha
discourse (Hieber a), and verbal valency and transitivity (Hieber b,
).
Since the end of the war with the French in , statements to the effect of
“the Chitimacha are now all but extinct” have appeared so many times in the
literature—decade aer decade well into the twentieth century—as to be ab-
surd (Gatschet ; Swanton , ; Swadesh ). Yet today the language
is beginning to thrive again. Far from going extinct, the Chitimacha language
has instead awoken from its sleep and entered a modern renaissance. is
chapter briefly outlines that story, looking at both the prehistory and history
of the Chitimacha language, before turning to some aspects of Chitimacha
grammar that appear to be shared with other languages of Louisiana and the
Southeast.
.
CONTACT WITH THE SOUTHEAST
Although the Chitimacha language is an isolate, it shares several grammatical
features with other languages of Louisiana and the US Southeast. is section
provides just three examples of ways in which the grammar of Chitimacha
has been drastically affected by its interactions with other languages in the
region: in its use of positional auxiliary verbs, switch-reference, and finally
agent-patient marking.
e Muskogean languages to the east, the Tunica language to the north,
and the Atakapa language to the west all have a set of verbs called positional
auxiliary verbs. ese auxiliary verbs indicate the position of the subject—
whether sitting, standing, or lying down. is pattern is seen throughout the
southeastern United States (Campbell :). e particular verbs are dif-
ferent for each language, as table . shows, but the general pattern is the same.
In Muskogean, these positional auxiliary verbs replaced an earlier set of aux-
iliary verbs that were incorporated into the main verb, changing their function
in the process (Booker :–). e same process seems to have occurred
in Chitimacha. e future tense marker -cuy- (sing.), -di- (pl.) clearly derives
from the verb cuw- (sing.), dut- (pl.; go, walk). Likewise, the progressive marker
-qix- comes from an archaic linking verb qix- (be). Originally, cuw- and qix-
were independent auxiliary verbs, and over time they joined with the main verb
and became tense markers before being replaced by the new positional auxiliary
verbs. ese changes directly mirror the ones that took place in Muskogean. So
Chitimacha shares not only this grammatical pattern but the history through
which the pattern developed.
Another grammatical feature found in Muskogean languages is switch-
reference, a method of marking verbs to indicate whether the next clause
will have the same subject or a different subject. Chitimacha does not have
a specific set of switch-reference markers, as the Muskogean languages do,
but it did develop its own means of accomplishing the same function. e
Table 1.1. Comparison of Positional Auxiliary Verbs in Several Southeastern Languages
Gloss Chitimacha
(isolate)
Atakapa (isolate;
Swanton 1929)
Choctaw
(Muskogean;
Broadwell
2006:209–11)
Tunica (isolate;
Haas 1946:349–
51)
sit hi‑ k átta‑ ‑na
stand ci‑ ta hikíya‑ ‑hki (exist)
lie pe‑ txt ittóla‑ ‑ra
:
participial suffixes -k (aer consonants), -g (aer vowels), and -tk (aer /n/)
are either used with auxiliary verbs, as in example (), or to modify a noun, as
in example () (Swadesh b:–).
() Kix qatin nuhcpa-pa giht-k hi-qi?
horse make.run- want- be-.
“Do you want your horse to run?” (lit. Are you wanting your horse to be made to
run?) (Swadesh d:Af.)
() Kaatspa-nk qam qoonak hix get-k qap duud-x-naqa.
stick- everything beat- here go--.
(ey came beating him with sticks and so forth.) (Swadesh d:Aa.)
However, the participle also developed a third function, allowing clauses to
be chained together into long sequences of events or ideas (Hieber a).
is typically involves a series of participial clauses each taking the suffix -k,
followed by a final clause with a fully conjugated main verb. Example () il-
lustrates this construction.
() Piya xih hi gaatst-k, wetk we nux gapt-k qutp ki
cane belly there cut- then the stone take- leather in
qapx waatst-k, huygi qapx qutii-g, wetk we piya gaatsn ki
together wrap- good together tie- then the cane cut.piece in
hi xahct-k, wetkx huygi kas hukt-k, wetkx hesigen qutp
to put.in- then good back close- then again leather
hi gapt-k, we piya gaatsn we qutp ki qapx waatst-k,
there take- the cane cut.piece the leather in together wrap-
huygi qapx qutii-g, weyt hugu kas nucmii-g, kas hamca-ax-naqa.
good together tie- that it.is back work- back keep--.
(ey cut a cane joint, take the stones and wrap them in hide, tie them well, put them
into the section of cane, cork them well, again take hide and wrap the cane section
in the hide, tie it well, and, having prepared it in that way, they save it.) (Swadesh
d:Ac.)
Some expository texts recorded by Swadesh consist almost entirely of such
chains of participial clauses, with very few main verbs. Why did this phenom-
enon become so common in Chitimacha? An examination of how particip-
ial clauses are used in the Chitimacha corpus shows that they are used only
when the subject of the participial clause is the same as the subject of the
following clause (Hieber a). Otherwise, a fully conjugated main verb is
used. is is the same pattern of switch-reference as seen in Muskogean, only
.
accomplished indirectly through the participle -k rather than with dedicated
markers for same and different subjects.
A final example of a grammatical pattern shared with other languages of the
Southeast is known as agent-patient marking, where different suffixes are used
depending on whether the participant involved in the action has control over
it. For example, in Creek (Muskogean), the agent marker -ay- is used when the
subject acts deliberately, while the patient marker ca- is used when the subject
lacks control of the action (Martin :–). Chitimacha shows a similar
pattern but with an important difference: the form of the agent and patient
markers is practically the same; instead, the position of the markers differs
(Hieber forthcoming). Compare examples () and ().
() quc-ki-cuy-i
do-sg.--.
(you will do me [well]) (Swadesh d:Ad.)
() quci-cu-ki
do--sg.
(I will do [it]) (Swadesh d:Ae.)
Example () shows that -ki appears before the irrealis (future) marker
-cuy- when the speaker does not have control of the action, whereas exam-
ple () shows that -ki appears aer -cuy- when the speaker does. How did
this pattern arise? at the irrealis marker -cuy- was originally an auxiliary
verb meaning “go,” so that the construction in () was historically two words,
qucki cuyi, meaning something like “you will go so that I do” or “you will go
and make me do.” But when Chitimacha speakers reanalyzed these as a single
verb, merging them together, the person suffix -ki remained in the middle.
Since the -ki in the middle referred to the participant having the action done
to it, while the -ki at the end of the second verb referred to the participant
doing the action, these two versions of -ki were reanalyzed as the patient
and agent suffixes, respectively. ese changes were undoubtedly modeled
on the similar agent-patient patterns in Muskogean and other languages of
the Southeast and would have been facilitated by the simultaneous change in
auxiliaries, discussed earlier. is helps explain why in Muskogean the agent
and patient suffixes are different forms, while in Chitimacha they are the same
form in different positions. Chitimacha co-opted its own native grammatical
material for new purposes, mimicking patterns found in other languages of
the Southeast.
In all three of these cases, Chitimacha borrowed a grammatical pattern
from neighboring languages without borrowing the related vocabulary or
:
grammatical affixes. For instance, Chitimacha borrowed the positional auxil-
iary pattern yet did not borrow the words for sit, stand, and lie, instead using
its own native words. Why did this happen?
e southeastern United States, including Louisiana, is considered a linguis-
tic and cultural area, meaning that the peoples of the region share numerous
cultural and linguistic traits that cannot result from a common origin (since
Chitimacha is unrelated to any other language in the region): “e defining
feature of Native cultures and histories in the region is first, a long history of
cultural integration within the region” (Jackson and Fogelson :). Exogamy
(marrying people from outside one’s own community) was widespread in the
historical Southeast, abetting contact between different cultures in the region
(Speck :). In addition, “the area was integrated by the exchange of goods,
people, and ideas such that it comprised one grand diffusion sphere. Commu-
nication was facilitated by well marked trail systems and by the use of dugout
canoes on the river and coastal courses” (Jackson, Fogelson, and Sturtevant
:). Groups within the Southeast were also highly mobile, oen changing
the sites of their villages (Swanton :–).
What all this means for Chitimacha grammar is that Native Americans in the
Southeast were very likely multilingual, knowing the language of their family as
their first language, the language of their spouse as their second, and a language
of trade and broader communication as a third. Such rampant multilingualism
constitutes the perfect environment for grammatical borrowing as occurred in
Chitimacha. When speakers adopt another language, they are frequently influ-
enced by ways of speaking from their first language and use structures from
the second language in ways that map to structures from their first. Speakers of
Chitimacha who also knew a Muskogean language, for example, probably used
the auxiliary verb construction to convey the equivalent of the agent-patient
distinction. Over time, this construction must have become so frequent as to
become routinized and eventually a fixed part of Chitimacha grammar.
So while Chitimacha is an isolate, it was hardly isolated. Instead, the Chiti-
macha people were part of the diverse cultural exchange of people, goods,
and languages of the Southeast that thrived for hundreds of years prior to
European contact, a fact that had significant repercussions on the history of
the Chitimacha language.
PREHISTORY AND COLONIAL CONTACT
As best we know, the Chitimacha and their ancestors have lived in the Loui-
siana region for thousands of years. From the archaeology of the region, we
know that Chitimacha participated in the Hopewell mound culture, which
.
was distinguished by its large burial mounds, arising around BCE and
flourishing with the arrival of farming in the area (ca. ACE) until its de-
cline prior to the fieenth century (Haywood :.). Numerous mound
sites have been found along the Bayou Teche (Bernard :), and the Chit-
imacha continued to entomb their dead in mounds into the colonial period
(Kniffen, Gregory, and Stokes :) and even the twentieth century, with
two mound burials occurring in .
As Jackson, Fogelson, and Sturtevant (:) note, “Ever since the discov-
ery of the elaborated iconography of Mississippian period art, popularizers
and scholars have sought to establish connections between the Southeastern
Ceremonial complex (formerly called the Southern cult) and the civilizations
of Mesoamerica.” is holds true for Chitimacha as well. ere have been sev-
eral attempts to show a genetic relationship between Chitimacha and certain
languages of Mesoamerica (Brown, Wichmann, and Beck ; Swadesh ),
potentially implying a Mesoamerican homeland for Chitimacha. However,
these proposals have not been widely accepted (see Campbell and Kaufman
; Campbell for a critique of older proposals). Moreover, if the sug-
gested relationships are true, they would be at such great time depth that the
ancestors of the Chitimacha still could have migrated to Louisiana millennia
ago. Indeed, the Chitimacha language shares a sufficient number of gram-
matical features with other languages of the US Southeast to suggest that the
Chitimacha people have lived in their present vicinity for some time.
Like nearly all Native peoples of the Americas, the Chitimacha were subject
to European diseases well before making direct contact with the Europeans
themselves. Although the documentary and archaeological evidence for mass
epidemics is actually rather scant, archaeological evidence and early historical
accounts make clear that parts of the Southeast had been greatly depopulated
by the time the French settled in Louisiana in (ornton ). Moreover,
exposure to European diseases was continual throughout the colonial period,
plaguing Native populations well into the s (ornton :). Native
American population decline in the Southeast appears to have been more of
an ongoing process than a onetime catastrophic event.
In any event, when the Chitimacha first appear in the historical record, their
estimated population of about three thousand individuals may have been a
mere fraction of their former numbers. ey are first mentioned by Iberville
on February , , when he wrote, “e chief and seven others came to me to
sing the calumet . . . allying me with four nations to the west of the Mississippi,
which are the Mougoulachas, Ouacha [Washa], Toutymascha [Chitimacha],
Yagueneschito [Yagnechito]” (Margry :; translation by author). It is also
possible, however, that Europeans encountered Chitimacha-speaking peoples
as early as , when Hernando de Soto’s expedition reached the mouth of
:
the Mississippi River. When Iberville ascended the Mississippi River some
years later, he met several Washa people (Swanton :), who, along with
the Chawasha, were said by Bienville to speak practically the same language
as the Chitimacha (Goddard et al. :). While Swanton (:–)
cautions that the actual settlements of the Washa were most likely further
inland on Bayou La Fourche, the Washa were clearly active along the Missis-
sippi. Swanton (:) seems to think that the Chitimacha themselves were
also originally situated on the Mississippi, near the northern end of Bayou La
Fourche. Indeed, these villages may have been the remnants of the Yagnechito,
who lived in the region during the war with the French and were said by Iber-
ville to speak Chitimacha. If the Washa, Chawasha, Yagnechito, or Chitimacha
were present along the Mississippi as early as the Soto expedition, they might
have met Soto’s men. In fact, Swanton () even raises the possibility that
one of these groups attacked Soto’s men with spears at the mouth of the river,
a story that persists in Chitimacha oral history to this day (Laudun ). It is
also likely that Robert de La Salle, who explored the Mississippi from north
to south in , would have met with Chitimacha-speaking peoples, since he
also explored the waterways around the Mississippi delta, although there is no
evidence of contact with Chitimacha in any of the records from that expedition.
e French did not generally explore either Bayou Teche or Bayou La
Fourche (the main areas of Chitimacha settlement) in the early s (Ber-
nard :; Brightman ; Swanton :), and the war with the French
forced the Chitimacha to retreat into the difficult-to-navigate waterways along
the sea, so little more is known of the Chitimacha during the colonial era. Aer
peace with the French in , they appear only sporadically in the historical
record until the late s. By , the tribe had been reduced to just a few
villages—at least two in Iberville Parish around Bayou La Fourche, at least one
on Bayou Plaquemine, and two others on Bayou Teche (Charenton and one
unknown) (Hutchins :).
DOCUMENTATION
While the earliest documentation of many languages in the Americas stems
from the work of Jesuit missionaries, who were motivated by a desire to
preach to Native Americans in their own language, no such work was under-
taken for Chitimacha despite an early visit by Jesuit priest Paul du Poisson
(). However, another common source of documentary materials in the
early United States was vocabulary lists recorded as part of a broad research
program on Native American languages outlined by omas Jefferson. Mo-
tivated in part by the philological and historical linguistic research coming
.
out of Europe in the late eighteenth century, Jefferson was fascinated by the
questions of whether Native American languages and cultures could be traced
to a “common origin” and of their relationships to Indo-European languages.
Cognizant of the fact that these languages were rapidly disappearing, Jeffer-
son wrote,
It is to be lamented then, very much to be lamented, that we have suffered
so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish, without our having
previously collected and deposited in the records of literature, the general
rudiments at least of the languages they spoke. Were vocabularies formed
of all the languages spoken in North and South America, preserving their
appellations of the most common objects in nature, of those which must
be present to every nation barbarous or civilized, with the inflections of
their nouns and verbs, their principles of regimen and concord, and these
deposited in all the public libraries, it would furnish opportunities to those
skilled in languages of the old world to compare them with these, now, or at
any future time, and hence to construct the best evidence of the derivation
of this part of the human race. (:–).
Jefferson also disseminated a standardized -item word list comprising
what he considered the “most common objects in nature”—fire, water, and
the like. ree members of the American Philosophical Society (of which Jef-
ferson was also a member)—Peter S. Duponceau, Albert S. Gallatin, and John
Pickering—pursued Jefferson’s program in earnest, collecting numerous vo-
cabularies of Native American languages. Jefferson () compiled these vo-
cabularies into a comparative list, which became the basis for Gallatin’s ()
influential first attempt at a classification of the languages of the Americas.
e first known documentation of the Chitimacha language is a vocabulary
recorded in at Attakapas Post at the request of Martin Duralde, com-
mandant of the Post of Opelousas. A copy the Duralde () vocabulary was
sent to Duponceau and today is housed at the American Philosophical Society
Library. at vocabulary was later published by Vater (), and data from the
vocabulary were included in the first major attempt to classify the languages of
the Americas by Gallatin () as well as in John Wesley Powell’s () revised
classification undertaken as part of his work with the Bureau of Ethnography.
e Duralde vocabulary and accompanying anthropological sketch are writ-
ten in French, and the Chitimacha words likewise use a French orthography
(although Duralde says he had transliterated them from a Spanish orthogra-
phy). Discrepancies in spelling aside, Duralde’s list shows no significant differ-
ences from later documentation by Albert Samuel Gatschet (a), Swanton
(), and Swadesh () (a fact also noted by Swadesh [a:]). Table .
:
presents a small selection of vocabulary items comparing the transcriptions of
Duralde, Gatschet, and Swadesh and that of the modern practical orthography:
At the end of the nineteenth century, research on Native American languages
largely fell under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, which founded
the Bureau of American Ethnology to research Native American cultures in
. Gatschet, a linguist and ethnologist trained in linguistics in Europe who
moved to the United States to study Native American languages, joined the
bureau when it was formed and did significant work with southeastern lan-
guages, including Chitimacha. He visited Charenton for several weeks between
December and January and worked with Baptiste Angélique at a
village on Grand Lake. Angélique was a Creole person of color who grew up
in close proximity to the Chitimacha but was not Chitimacha himself. He
was approximately seventy-six years old at the time. According to Gatschet
(:), roughly sixteen to eighteen Chitimacha people were living on Grand
Lake and another thirty-five resided at Charenton, and about half of them still
spoke Chitimacha. Gatschet (b) recorded enough material for a dictionary
consisting of , file slips (generally with multiple words/phrases per slip) and
a long expository text about Chitimacha traditional culture. ese materials
and his accompanying field notes are now housed in the Smithsonian at the
National Anthropological Archives (Gatschet a). Gatschet () published
a short anthropological sketch of the Chitimacha but said little about the lan-
guage other than that it “seems to be extremely polysynthetic” (). He never
published either the texts or vocabulary, but both Swanton and Swadesh ob-
tained copies of Gatschet’s materials and incorporated his data into their own.
Table 1.2. Comparison of Chitimacha Vocabulary, 1802, 1881, and 1930
Gloss Duralde (1802) Gatschet (1881a) Swadesh (1930) Practical*
re teppe tep tep Tep
water ko ku kuʼ Kuq
earth nelle ne, ne-i neyʼ Neyq
air poko poko, pokuⁿ poku Poka
sun thiaha tcha, tchia-a ʼaʼa Jaqa
moon pantne paⁿ, pan, pantⁿ panʼ Panq
star pacheta pshta paːšta Paaxta
day, light uacheta washta wašta Waxta
night timan tchiʼma ʼima Jima
* Deviations from the International Phonetic Alphabet are as follows: <aa> = /aː/, <b> = /pˀ/,
<c> = /t
͡ʃ/, <d> = /tˀ/, <dz> = /t
͡sˀ/, <ee> = /eː/, <g> = /kˀ/, <ii> = /iː/, <j> = /t
͡ʃˀ/, <oo> = /oː/, <q> = /ʔ/,
<ts> = /t
͡s/, <uu> = /uː/, <x> = /ʃ/, <y> = /j/.
.
In the early s, the field of anthropology was undergoing drastic changes
as a result of the influence of Franz Boas, the father of modern anthropology.
Boas stressed the notion of cultural relativism and the importance of study-
ing cultures on their own terms. Swanton was one of Boas’s earliest students
at Columbia and in became the first formally trained anthropologist to
join the Bureau of American Ethnology (Jackson, Fogelson, and Sturtevant
:). Swanton became interested in working on Chitimacha aer seeing
Gatschet’s materials in the Smithsonian archives (Swanton ) and at Boas’s
direction traveled to Charenton in , returning again in , , and
(Swanton :).
Swanton worked with Chief Paul, who is perhaps the person most respon-
sible for the survival of the Chitimacha language today. Paul worked with
Swanton during all four of his visits as well as with Swadesh during the s.
Approximately percent of all the documentary material on Chitimacha
comes from him. According to Swanton (:), “e language has fallen so
much into disuse that [Paul] could recall many things only with difficulty and
there is reason to believe that it has lost many forms and much of its original
richness,” but this statement seems to have resulted more from Swanton’s in-
ability to puzzle out the grammar of Chitimacha than any linguistic deficiency
on the chief’s part. Swanton confused an adjective-making suffix, -gi, with a
first singular patient suffix, -ki (Swanton ; Hieber forthcoming), and calls
the first singular gerund -ka a continuative marker (Swanton :), among
other issues. But Chief Paul dictated eighty-eight texts—many quite lengthy—to
Swadesh two decades later, with little to no evidence of language obsolescence.
Swadesh (a:–) later observed, “Remarkable in the terminal history of
Chitimacha is the purity with which it was preserved. . . . Chitimacha shows
no signs of influence by French or English, nor is there anything suggestive of
internal disintegration, unless the presence of alternate equivalent forms is such
a symptom.” Even Swadesh (b), whose grammatical analysis is significantly
more accurate than Swanton’s, attributes certain grammatical alternations to
mere free variation, implying a kind of randomness to the language. He says, for
example, that “a peculiarity of Chitimacha is the presence of a number of cases
of alternate equivalent forms, not different as to meaning. . . . In the adjective
there are oen three or more forms for the singular, as iwi, iwgi, i·ni, iwa,
iwg() ‘bad’” (a:). However, a more detailed look at the Chitimacha
corpus shows that these forms are actually the gerund/infinitive “to be bad,”
the adjective “bad,” the patientive adjective “having become/been made bad,”
the noun “bad thing,” and the participle “being bad” (with or without the topic
marker -š), respectively.
What Swanton and Swadesh attributed to language obsolescence or lack
of grammatical structure was in fact a de command of the language on the
:
part of Chief Paul. His texts show nuanced control of such semantic subtle-
ties as the agent/patient distinction, use of directional preverbs, and use of
various verbal suffixes—constructions that both Swanton and Swadesh had
difficulty analyzing. Paul’s ability to productively employ grammatical forms
in novel constructions becomes more evident when comparing his texts to
that of another speaker, Ducloux, who worked with Swadesh in the s. She
dictated twenty-two texts, but her discourse shows less productive use of these
constructions, some of which seem to have become fossilized expressions.
As one example, Ducloux used the word gapt- by itself to mean “take away”
(Swadesh a:), whereas Paul used the appropriate preverb to express the
sense of “away,” depending on context—hi gapt- (take there) or kap gapt- (take
up)—suggesting that Ducloux’s ability to use the preverbs productively was
not quite as robust as her uncle’s. Ducloux also used more French borrowings
than did Chief Paul and used the French /v/ where Paul used /w/. For the most
part, however, Ducloux’s speech was extremely fluent; other differences in the
way they used certain constructions are difficult to spot.
e discrepancy between Swanton and Swadesh’s descriptions of Chitimacha
grammar and Paul and Ducloux’s skillful use of the language shows just how
easy it was for even cultural relativists in the tradition of Boas to view Native
American languages or their speakers as deficient, when in fact the discrepan-
cies were a matter of ignorance on the part of the linguists—a valuable lesson
for today’s fieldworkers.
Swadesh, a famous student of Edward Sapir, began fieldwork on Chitimacha
in , producing the most comprehensive set of documentary materials on
the language to date. In , he made a number of wax cylinder recordings,
which are still available in digital form (albeit of very poor quality), and by ,
he had produced sixteen composition notebooks filled with words, sentences,
and transcribed texts (Swadesh ). By , he had prepared dras of a
dictionary of approximately thirty-five hundred words (Swadesh a); a col
-
lection of texts and their translations, with the Chitimacha portion totaling
typed pages (Swadesh d); and even a thorough, -page descriptive
grammar (Swadesh b). ese were never published, perhaps partially as
a consequence of the political challenges facing Swadesh at the height of the
McCarthy era in the late s, when he lost his position at the City College
of New York as a result of his leist political ideologies (Hymes :–).
Swadesh worked in the Boas Collection at the American Philosophical Society
starting in , at which point he seems to have deposited his nearly finished
manuscripts and ceased further work on the language.
ough Swadesh’s Boasian trifecta of a grammar, dictionary, and text collec-
tion was never published, the Chitimacha data he collected and the articles he
published using those data came to have a tremendous and enduring impact on
.
the field of linguistics. His work on Chitimacha was influential in his formula-
tion of the phonemic principle (Swadesh b), and indeed, his description
of Chitimacha phonology (a) was the first sketch of a Native American
language to apply phonemic principles. Swadesh () was also one of the first
to draw attention to the issue of language endangerment, for which he used
Chitimacha as a prominent example. ough Swadesh’s controversial theory
of glottochronology would later make him well known in linguistics, his first
attempt at historical reconstruction was actually an attempt to show a genetic
relationship between Chitimacha and Atakapa (Swadesh b, ). (is
attempt was mostly ignored and receives little credence from modern tribal
members or linguists.) e Chitimacha language was therefore a prominent
influence on the early development of American linguistics.
REVITALIZATION
Aer Swadesh’s work in the s, very little was done with the Chitimacha
language for almost seventy years (though see the comparative work of Haas
, ). James Crawford (:) recorded fourteen words from Emile
Stouff in ; one of the few remaining basket weavers still remembers a
number of terms relating to weaving; and elderly members of the tribe re-
membered a few words into the s (Rosetta Stone ); however, the
language was no longer used in the community. And, as was oen the case for
Native American communities, tribal members were not made aware that ex-
tensive documentary materials existed on their language until the s. Even
then, several more years passed before the Chitimacha tribe had the resources
to undertake a language revitalization program. e tribe opened a casino in
and used part of the revenue it generated to finance the Cultural Depart-
ment and hire several tribal members to work on the revitalization project.
Aer enlisting the help of a linguist who had studied under Swadesh decades
earlier, the Cultural Department embarked on a broad language revitalization
program, beginning work on a comprehensive dictionary aimed at elementa-
ry school students, offering both youth and adult language classes, and creat-
ing language primers. Today, language instruction starts six weeks aer birth
at Yaamahana (the Child Development Center, the tribal preschool) and has
been incorporated into the K– curriculum at the tribal elementary school.
Night classes have also been offered for adults, and some of the tribal mem-
bers who attended that class have gone on to join the revitalization program.
For the first time in decades, the Chitimacha language is a prominent feature
of public events, with most occasions including an opening prayer and the
:
Indian Pledge of Allegiance in Chitimacha as well as signs in both English
and Chitimacha.
In , the Chitimacha tribe won a worldwide grant competition from the
soware company Rosetta Stone to create language-learning soware. e Ro-
setta Stone Endangered Language Program, where I served as Editor from
to , worked with various Native American and First Nations educators and
nonprofits to produce language-learning soware, granting all rights to the sales
and distribution of the product to the indigenous organizations. In conjunction
with the Endangered Language Program, the Chitimacha Cultural Department
worked tirelessly over the course of two years to produce a Chitimacha Rosetta
Stone, which was officially released in . e soware is now provided free to
every tribal member and has been incorporated into the language curriculum
in the tribal elementary school. e tribe subsequently invited me to continue
working with them in their revitalization efforts, and today, the members of the
Cultural Department and I are working to produce various classroom materials
and finalize the dictionary for the elementary school.
What Duralde, Gatschet, Swanton, and Swadesh thought was an attempt to
capture the last remnant of the Chitimacha language before it faded into
history was in fact the beginning of a linguistic revival. anks to the inex-
haustible work of speakers like Baptiste Angélique, Delphine Ducloux, and
especially Chief Benjamin Paul, who spent nearly three decades working with
linguists to document his language, as well as the monumental efforts of the
Cultural Department of the Chitimacha Tribe, the future of the Chitimacha
language is looking bright again.
NOTES
e research in this chapter is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship Program, Grant . Many thanks are due to Chitimacha
cultural director Kimberley S. Walden and Dayna Bowker Lee for their detailed feedback and
assistance writing this chapter. I also thank Marianne Mithun, Brendon Yoder, and Jared Sharp
for taking the time to read an earlier dra and offer comments. All errors or other shortcomings
are of course wholly my own.
. European diseases may have affected the Chitimacha as early as Hernando de Soto’s
expedition, which reached the mouth of the Mississippi River in (Swanton ).
. More precisely, -cuy-/-di- is an irrealis marker, and -qix- is an imperfective.
. Glossing abbreviations are as follows: agent, instrumental, imperfective,
irrealis, non-first-person, nominalizer, patient, plural, participle, singular.
.
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