Atakapa language

Atakapa
Ishakkoy, Yukhiti Kóy
Native to	United States
Region	Southwestern Louisiana, eastern Texas
Ethnicity	Atakapa
Extinct	early 20th century
Revival	late 2010s
Language family	Language isolate
Dialects	Western (Yukhíti) Eastern (Hiyékiti) Orkokisak
Writing system	Latin script
Official status
Regulated by	None, unregulated
Language codes
ISO 639-3	aqp
Glottolog	atak1252
Linguasphere	68-BAA-a
Pre-contact distribution of the Atakapa language
Atakapa is classified as Extinct by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

Atakapa (/əˈtækəpə, -pɑː/, natively Ishakkoy) is an extinct language isolate native to southwestern Louisiana and nearby coastal eastern Texas. It was spoken by the Atakapa people (also known as Ishak, after their word for "the people"). The language became extinct in the early 20th century, with its last native speaker dying in the 1930s.

Although native speech ceased in the 1930s, Atakapa, is categorized as dormant and in the process of revitalization. Early groundwork for revitalization was done by Hubert Singleton, former chief of the Atakapa Ishak Nation. Singleton in the 1990s published a compiled list of phrases in Atakapa based off an earlier published dictionary of Atakapa by Albert S. Gatschet and John R. Swanton.

Modern efforts of revitalization have incorporated work by linguist David V. Kaufman in the form of a new orthography of the language and a published revised version of the Gatschet and Swanton dictionary. A published book of revised grammar by Geoffrey D. Kimball is also used in revitalization efforts. Today, members of the Atakapa Ishak Nation have used revitalization efforts to create poems, songs, and contemporary narratives.

Person	Ishāk
People	Ishāk
Language	Ishākkoy, Yukhiti Kóy

Classification

See also: Gulf languages

While considered an isolate, there have been attempts to connect Atakapa with other languages of the Southeast. In 1919 John R. Swanton proposed a Tunican language family that would include Atakapa, Tunica, and Chitimacha; Morris Swadesh would later provide work focusing on connections between Atakapa and Chitimacha. Mary Haas later expanded the proposal by adding Natchez and the Muskogean languages, a hypothesis known as Gulf.

These proposed families have not been proven, with modern consensus treating Atakapa as an independent isolate. The similarities between Atakapa and Chitimacha, are believed to be attributable to periods of "intense contact [between speakers of the two languages] owing to their geographic proximity."

Dialects

According to Swanton (1929) and Goddard (1996), Atakapa could be classified into Eastern and Western varieties. In modern standardized classifications, these dialects are referred to as Hiyékiti ("Sunrise people," Eastern) and Yukhíti ("Sunset People," Western).

Additionally, in 1721, Jean Béranger collected a small vocabulary from captive speakers in Galveston Bay. Swanton argued that the Béranger vocabulary represented the Akokisa (Orkokisak) language, spoken by a people who lived somewhat inland from Galveston Bay. David V. Kaufman in his revised dictionary includes Akokisa, revised as Orkokisak as a sperate dialect.

Eastern Atakapa (Hiyékiti)

Eastern Atakapa (Hiyékiti, "Sunrise people") is primarily known from a French-Atakapa glossary with 287 words, compiled in 1802 by Spanish commandant Martin Duralde. The speakers interviewed by Duralde lived in the easternmost part of Atakapa territory, around Poste des Attakapas (now Saint Martinville) along the Vermilion Bayou and Mermentau River.

Western Atakapa (Yukhíti)

Western Atakapa (Yukhíti, "Sunset people"; "people") was spoken around the Calcasieu, Sabine, and Neches rivers near Lake Charles, Louisiana. It represents the most documented Atakapan dialect.

In 1885, Albert Gatschet collected words, sentences, and texts from two native Atakapa speakers, Louison Huntington (Kishyuc) and Delilah Moss (Tottoksh) at Lake Charles, Louisiana. John R. Swanton later worked with an additional two speakers near Lake Charles: Teet Verdine in 1907, and Armojean Reon in 1908.

There is a measurable contrast between Eastern Atakapa and Western Atakapa as many vocabulary words differ between each dialect and counting systems differ dramatically, such as atehl ("today") in Eastern Atakapa versus ayíl ("today") in Western Atakapa and kam ("fire") in Eastern Atakapa versus the Western dialect's kicóņsh.

Orkokisak (Akokisa)

Orkokisak ("persimmon-gathering people") was spoken around Galveston Bay and the lower Trinity and San Jacinto rivers in eastern Texas. Geoffrey Kimball reconstructed the name Orkokisak as an Atakapan compound meaning "persimmon-gathering people" (ōl "persimmon" + kókish "gather/take" + ishāk "person"). The earliest documented Atakapan vocabulary was taken by Jean Béranger in 1721 from captive speakers in Galveston Bay. Differences of words in the Orkokisak dialect compared to other dialects can be seen in many words. For example, ihl ("day") in Orkokisak is yil ("day") in the Western Dialect.

Environmental context

Ethnohistorical and geoarchaeological research proposed by Dan Worrall in A Prehistory of Houston and Southeast Texas: Landscape and Culture suggests that the distribution of Atakapan dialects corresponds to costal river drainage basins where the Atakapan people inhabited. He suggests that post-glacial sea level rise gradually submerged the coastal plains, and separated Atakapan bands into isolated river valleys, with the geographical separation causing dialects to form across drainage boundaries while still having mutual intelligibility.

Phonology

Vowels

Atakapa has five vowels as presented in Swadesh (1946). Vowel length is contrastive in Atakapa.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e		o
Open		a

Consonants

According to Swadesh (1946), Atakapa has the consonants presented in the following chart.

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m		n		ŋ
Plosive	p	t	ts ⟨c⟩		k
Fricative			ɬ ⟨ł⟩	ʃ ⟨š⟩		h
Approximant	w		l	j ⟨y⟩

Underlying /ŋ/ surfaces as [k] when it appears at the end of a syllable. Swadesh further notes that /m/ often surfaces as [n] or [ŋ] word-finally in some adjectives, but "irregular variations in [Gatschet's] writing" preclude him from settling on any further conditions for this. Additionally, it is unclear whether /n/ is indeed a distinct phoneme from /ŋ/; if this is the case, argues Swadesh, then words containing final /n/ must have arrived in a later period.

Consonant clusters consisting of a stop followed by a sibilant—themselves arising from vowel epenthesis—are generally contracted to /c/. For example, kec-k ("liver") arose from *keks, which arose from epenthesis and final-vowel deletion processes in *kekesi, which itself is the reduplicated form of *kesi. However, there are words in which the suffix -kš appears, suggesting that this contraction rule ran its course in an earlier period.

Syllable structure and stress

The typical Atakapa syllable is of the structure CVC. Swanton (1929) observes that clusters of more than two consonants are rare in the language. From his analysis of Gatschet's data, he concludes that consonant clusters of any size are not permitted in the syllable onset, but that they are permitted in the coda.

Stress is "a purely mechanical function of phrase rhythm" in Atakapa; it is generally the final syllable of a phrase that receives stress.

Morphology

The Atakapa language is a mostly agglutinative, somewhat polysynthetic language of the templatic type. This meaning that the language stacks (primarily within the verbal complex) a number of affixes to express locatives, tense, aspect, modality, valency adjustment, and person/number (as both subject and object), which are assembled in a rather specific order. Person marking is one of the only instances of fusion within the language, fusing both person and number. Nouns have only a handful of suffixes and usually take only one suffix at a time.

The language is largely head-marking; however, reduplication of an adjectival stem tends to show dependent-marking, as it often expresses the plurality of the noun it describes.

1. shāk tōl "good man"
2. shāk tōltōl "good men"

Pronominal morphology

Object pronouns are prefixed to verbs, while subject pronouns are suffixed. There are independent forms of each pronoun as well: in the first person singular and plural, this form appears to be distinct from either affix, but in the second and third persons, the affixes seem to be related to the independent forms.

Grammatical gender appears not to occur in Atakapa, though evidence for it in nearby languages (e.g. Chitimacha) has been found.

The following table of pronominal forms is presented in Swanton (1919).

Number	Person	Independent	Objective	Subjective
Singular	1	wi	hi-	-ō
	2	na	na-, n-
	3	ha	ha-
	Indefinite		hi-
Plural	1	yūkit	ic-	-tse
	2	nakit	nak-	-tem
	3	hakit	hak-	-ūl, -ti (with intransitives)

In addition, Swanton notes the existence of a reflexive prefix hat- and a reciprocal prefix hak-. However, the reflexive form may be a circumfix rather than a prefix: Kaufman cites the example of hat-yul-šo ("paint themselves"), in which both hat- and -šo indicate reflexivity.

Nominal morphology

There are multiple ways to indicate a noun's plurality in Atakapa:

1. attachment to the noun of the suffix -heu ("many")
2. attachment to the noun of the prefix -šak (to indicate an indefinite plural)
3. reduplication of the accompanying adjective
4. employment of the plural suffix in the accompanying adjective and/or verb

According to Swanton (1919), a noun-forming affix -nen or -nan exists in Atakapa.

Verbal morphology

The full order of morphemes within the verb complex is:

1. Objective pronominal prefix
2. Locative prefixes (if applicable)
3. Verb stem
4. Plural suffix -m or usitative suffix -u (if applicable)
5. Infinitive or emphatic suffix -c (if applicable)
6. Future suffix -ti (if applicable)
7. Aspectual suffixes: continuative -k, intentional -n, etc. (if applicable)
8. Assertive suffix: -š (if applicable)
9. Subjective pronominal suffix
10. Tense suffixes: past perfective -at, past imperfective -hinst (if applicable)
11. Negative (if applicable)

It is unclear whether or not a distinct class of auxiliary verbs exists in Atakapa; the difference between a stem-plus-auxiliary construction and a two-verb-serialization construction is not well marked.

Additionally, there is no mention of the assertive suffix -š in Swanton's work; Kaufman (2014) derives it by analogizing Atakapa and Chitimacha.

Verb serialization

Verb serialization is a productive process in Atakapa.

1. pam-nima (lit. "beat-die"): beat to death.
2. ta-wat-ten (lit. "stand-come-talk"): pray.

Syntax

Atakapa exhibits strict subject-object-verb word order. While verbs are typically found in sentence-final position, it is common for adjuncts, or even subordinate clauses, to follow the verb of the principal clause. The suffixes -ne and -n are used to indicate the subordination of a clause to the main clause, as in tsanuk micat penene ("she gave a horse [for curing her]").

With occasional exceptions, adjectives follow the nouns they describe. Adverbs follow nouns and adjectives, but precede verbs.

Case marking

Atakapa marks only the locative case. The language has four locative suffixes, in addition to a series of locative postpositions. These suffixes and postpositions may be placed after nouns, adjectives, and demonstratives.

• -kin, the most frequently-occurring suffix, expresses the sense of English "in" or "on", as in nun-kin tōhulāt ("they lived in villages").
  • -ki (occasionally -ke) occurs in similar contexts.
• -ip corresponds roughly to English "at", and is very commonly used with nē, "down", to form nēp, "below".
• -ik generally parallels English "with", as in hatyūlcō nōhik ("they painted themselves with red").

Noun incorporation

Swanton (1919) asserts that noun incorporation is present in Atakapa, but he provides no examples of this.

Deixis

Three demonstratives serve as deictics in Atakapa:

1. ha or a, "this"—co-present with the speaker.
2. ya, distant from the speaker.
3. ma, still more distant from the speaker.

Bibliography

• Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
• Gatschet, Albert S., and Swanton, John R. (1932) A Dictionary of the Atakapa Language. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Athnology, bulletin 108. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
• Goddard, Ives (2005). "The indigenous languages of the Southeast". Anthropological Linguistics. 47 (1): 1–60. JSTOR 25132315.
• Hopkins, Nicholas A. (2007). The Native Languages of the Southeastern United States. Los Angeles: Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI), pp. 23–24. Abstract. Full text online.
• Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
• Swadesh, Morris (1946). "Phonologic Formulas for Atakapa-Chitimacha". International Journal of American Linguistics. 12 (3): 113–132. doi:10.1086/463901. S2CID 144473306.
• Swanton, John R (1929). "A sketch of the Atakapa language". International Journal of American Linguistics. 5 (2–4): 121–149. doi:10.1086/463777. JSTOR 1263302. S2CID 143735208.

External links

• A Dictionary of the Atakapa Language by Albert S. Gatschet and John R. Swanton, hosted by the Portal to Texas History
• John Reed Swanton (1919). A structural and lexical comparison of the Tunica, Chitimacha, and Atakapa languages. Govt. Printing Office. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
• Atakapa-Ishak Nation
• Atakapa Indian Language