Chickasaw
Chikashshanompaꞌ
Native to	United States
Region	South centralOklahoma, from Byng or Happyland (near Ada) north, and from Davis or Ardmore west to Fillmore and Wapanucka in east.
Ethnicity	35,000 (1999)[1]
Native speakers	75 (2017)[1]
Language family	Muskogean Western Muskogean Chickasaw
Language codes
ISO 639-3	cic
Glottolog	chic1270
ELP	Chickasaw
Historical Chickasaw territory and  current Chickasaw territory (Chickasaw Nation), where the language was and is currently spoken
Distribution ofNative American languages inOklahoma
This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA.

TheChickasaw language (Chikashshanompaꞌ,Chickasaw pronunciation:[tʃikaʃːanompaʔ]) is aNative American language of theMuskogean family. It isagglutinative and follows the word order pattern ofsubject–object–verb (SOV).^[2] The language is closely related to, though perhaps not entirelymutually intelligible with,Choctaw. It is spoken by theChickasaw tribe, now residing in SoutheastOklahoma, centered onAda.

The language is currently spoken by around 50 people, mostly Chickasaw elders who grew up with the language. Due toboarding schools in the 20th century andChickasaw removal fromtheir homeland in the 19th century, the widespread knowledge about the language and culture amongst the nation has largely decreased.

Chickasaw,Choctaw andHouma form the Western branch of theMuskogean language family. The Chickasaw and Choctaw were once one tribe who similarly spoke the Muskogean languages.^[3] The Chickasaw language was widely spoken until 1970 but has since become an endangered language.^[3] Chickasaw is also related toAlabama,Koasati,Mvskoke (Creek)-Seminole, Hitchiti and Mikasuki.^[4]

Sometime prior to the first European contact, the Chickasaw migrated from western regions and moved east of the Mississippi River, where they settled mostly in present-day northeast Mississippi. Chickasaw towns and villages were structured to be densely populated as a wartime measure but encompassed larger areas when there was no conflict with enemies.^[3] A main house and main meeting ground were used to gather groups from the Chickasaw community for ceremonies, celebratory affairs, and to discuss important social, cultural, and political matters.^[3] There was a division and specialization in labor done by men who prepared the community for war, hunted for food, and made provisions for the defense of their communities whileChickasaw women were matriarchal leaders of their households who cared for crops, children, and estate matters.^[3] They would eventually come into contact with Europeans as time passed on and European exploration of their lands took shape.^[3] That is where they encountered European explorers and traders, having relationships with French, English and Spanish during the colonial years. The United States considered the Chickasaw one of theFive Civilized Tribes, as they adopted numerous practices of European Americans. Resisting European-American settlers encroaching on their territory, they were forced by the US to sell their country in 1832 and move to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) during the era of Indian Removal in the 1830s.

Emily Johnson Dickerson, the last monolingual speaker of Chickasaw, died on December 30, 2013.^[5]Ethnologue estimated in its seventeenth edition that Chickasaw retained up to 600 speakers, but noted that this figure was rapidly declining because most speakers are 50 and older.^[6] Children are no longer acquiring the language,^[6] indicating Chickasaw has a notably low vitality. As of 2014, there were "four to five confident conversational speakers who are under the age of 35."^[7] The Chickasaw language is not much used outside of the home. In terms of conservation and language vitality, Ethnologue evaluates the current language situation asmoribund,^[6] andUNESCO lists Chickasaw as a "severely endangered" language, also noting that most of the ~50 speakers (as of 2019) are over fifty and almost all are bilingual inEnglish.^[8]

The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, founded in 2007, uses bothMunro-Willmond and Humes alphabets. Because Chickasaw is a spoken language, "there is no 'right' or 'wrong' way to spell Chickasaw."^[9] Chickasaw is taught through a master-apprentice program, community programs, and self-study programs.

A "Chickasaw Language Basic" app is available foriPhone,iPad, and otheriOS devices.^[10]

In a collaboration withApple, Inc., the Chickasaw language keyboard layout is available iniOS 16.4,iPadOS 16.4 andmacOS Ventura 13.3 and later to help users type with "special characters for pitch accent, nasal vowels and the glottal stop character."^[11][12]

TheChickasaw Nation has a department of Chickasaw Language with a 24-member Chickasaw Language Committee. In 2007, the tribe founded the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program. Four levels of Chickasaw language classes are taught atEast Central University inAda, Oklahoma. Joshua D. Hinson (called "Lokosh," meaning gourd, in the language), director of the Chickasaw Language Committee developed master-apprenticeship programs with guidance from linguistLeanne Hinton.^[13][7]

Chipota Chikashshanompoli is a children's language program that meets monthly. Ada, Ardmore, Norman, Purcell, Sulphur, and Tishomingo all host non-academic adult language classes. The tribe also organizes immersion camps and publishes Chickasaw language literature through the Chickasaw Press.^[13]More recently, the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program has been working withRosetta Stone andAckerman McQueen, releasing a video series teaching learners how to speak Chickasaw with theRosetta Stone Advanced Languages software.

Chickasaw has 16consonants. In the table below, the consonants are written in the standard Chickasaw orthography. The phonetic symbolization of each consonant is written in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to the right of each orthographic letter when the orthography differs from the IPA symbol.

• /w/ islabiovelar.
• Voiceless stops/ptk/ have a small amount ofaspiration[pʰtʰkʰ], especially at the beginning of words.^[14]
• The voiced stop/b/ may undergolenition to a voiced fricative[β] between vowels.^[14]
• All consonants except for theglottal stop may be geminated and most consonants can occur in biconsonantal clusters.^[14]

Chickasaw has 9vowels:^[16]

Chickasaw vowels contrast betweenshort and long oral vowels and between long oral vowels and longnasal vowels. Short vowels are centralized (see chart): shorti is phonetically[ɪ], shorto is phonetically[o̟], and shorta is phonetically[ə].

Short vowels are also phonetically lengthened when they occur in the second syllable of a sequence of even-numberedopen syllables.^[17] For example, the wordpisali ('I took him') is phonetically[pɪsəˑlɪ]. The lengthened short vowel is usually intermediate in length between a short vowel and long vowel. However, the phonetic realization varies depending on the individual speaker and also on phonetic environment. The lengthening does not occur at the end of words and is further restricted by certain morphological criteria.^[18]

,

This sectionneeds expansion. You can help byadding to it.(June 2008)

• pitch accent

Verb arguments (i.e.subject,direct object,indirect object) are indicated with pronominalaffixes (both prefixes and suffixes) which are added to verbstems. The pronominal affixes areinflected according tonumber (singular, plural) andperson (1st, 2nd).

Chickasaw has anactive–stative pronominal system with two basic series of pronominal sets: an active series (I) and a stative series (II). Additionally, Chickasaw also has dative (III), negative (N), andreciprocal (IR) series.

The active series is used for activeintransitive subjects and activetransitive subjects. (Anactive subject, simply put, is a subject that is in control of the action while astative subject does not have control of the action. This is the difference betweenShe fell on purpose vs.She fell accidentally where the firstshe controlled the falling while the secondshe did not control the falling.) The active series is in the table below:

The third person lacks an affix and usually does not distinguish between singular and plural. The first person singular affix is a suffix while the other affixes are prefixes. The first person plural has two forms:il- which is used before vowels andii- which is used before consonants — thus,il-iyya "we go",ii-malli "we jump". An exampleinflectional paradigm of the verbmalli "to jump" is below (with the pronominal affixes underlined):

The stative series (II) is below. This series is used to indicate stative intransitive subjects and direct objects.

Example with stative intransitive subjects,lhinko "to be fat":

Example with direct objects,pisa "to look at (someone)" (the subject in the paradigm below isunmarked because it is in the third person):

Both active and stative affixes can occur together in which case the active affix indicates the active subject and the stative affix indicates the direct object. Active prefixes occur before stative prefixes. Whenish- "active second person singular" occurs beforesa- "stative first person singular", it results inissa- (theshassimilates tos). Likewise,hash- "active second person plural" +sa- is realized ashassa-. The full paradigm ofpisa "to look at" is below:

This sectionneeds expansion. You can help byadding to it.(June 2008)

• verbgrades (gemination,epenthesis)

• Gordon, Matthew (2004). "A phonological and phonetic study of word-level stress in Chickasaw".International Journal of American Linguistics.70 (1):1–32.doi:10.1086/422264.S2CID 10574720.
• Gordon, Matthew; Munro, Pamela;Ladefoged, Peter (2000). "Some phonetic structures of Chickasaw".Anthropological Linguistics.42 (3):366–400.JSTOR 30028763.
• Gordon, Matthew; Munro, Pamela;Ladefoged, Peter (2001)."Illustrations of the IPA: Chickasaw".Journal of the International Phonetic Association.31 (2):287–290.doi:10.1017/s0025100301002110.
• Munro, Pamela (2005). "Chickasaw". In Hardy, Heather K.; Scancarelli, Janine (eds.).Native Languages of the Southeastern United States. Lincoln, NE:University of Nebraska Press. pp. 114–156.ISBN 978-0-8032-4235-7.
• Munro, Pamela; Willmond, Catherine (1994).Chickasaw: An analytical dictionary. Norman:University of Oklahoma Press.ISBN 9780806126623.
• Munro, Pamela; Willmond, Catherine (2008).Chikashshanompaꞌ Kilanompoliꞌ [Let's Speak Chickasaw] (in Chickasaw and English). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.ISBN 9780806139265.
• "The Chickasaw People".University of Tennessee Martin. 2017.

Chickasaw language test ofWikipedia atWikimedia Incubator

For a list of words relating to Chickasaw language, see theChickasaw language category of words inWiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, Chickasaw Nation
• Chickasaw Language - Information & Videos - Chickasaw.TV
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Chickasaw
• A phonological and phonetic study of word-level stress in Chickasaw (pdf)
• The phonology of pitch accents in Chickasaw (pdf)
• OLAC resources in and about the Chickasaw language
• A History of the Chickasaw People (website)
• http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chickasaw.htm

• Agglutinative languages
• Chickasaw
• Muskogean languages
• Subject–object–verb languages
• Indigenous languages of Oklahoma
• Indigenous languages of the North American Southeast
• Native American language revitalization
• Endangered Indigenous languages of the Americas

• Language articles citing Ethnologue 21
• Webarchive template wayback links
• CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles containing Chickasaw-language text
• Pages with Chickasaw IPA
• Pages with plain IPA
• Articles to be expanded from June 2008
• All articles to be expanded
• CS1 foreign language sources (ISO 639-2)