Choctaw language


The Choctaw language, traditionally spoken by the Native American Choctaw people of the southeastern United States, is a member of the Muskogean family. Chickasaw, Choctaw and Houma form the Western branch of the Muskogean language family. Although Chickasaw is sometimes listed as a dialect of Choctaw, more extensive documentation of Chickasaw has shown that Choctaw and Chickasaw are best treated as separate but closely related languages.

Orthography

The written Choctaw language is based upon the English version of the Roman alphabet and was developed in conjunction with the civilization program of the United States in the early 19th century. Although there are other variations of the Choctaw alphabet, the three most commonly seen are the Byington, Byington/Swanton, and Modern.
Many publications by linguists about the Choctaw language use a slight variant of the "modern " orthography listed here, where long vowels are written as doubled. In the "linguistic" version, the acute accent shows the position of the pitch accent, rather than the length of the vowel.
The discussion of Choctaw grammar below uses the linguistic variant of the orthography.
, 1909.
, Present.
  1. Choctaw Bible Translation Committee
  2. Substituted with 'v' according to typesetting or encoding constraints.
  3. The former is used before a vowel; the latter, before a consonant. The intervocalic use of conflated the common consonant cluster /hl/ with /ɬ/.
  4. Dictionary editors John Swanton and Henry Halbert systematically replaced all instances of with <ł>, regardless whether stood for /ɬ/ or /hl/. Despite the editors' systematic replacement of all with <ł>, the digraph was allowed to stand.

    Dialects

There are three dialects of Choctaw :
  1. "Native" Choctaw on the Choctaw Nation in southeastern Oklahoma
  2. Mississippi Choctaw of Oklahoma on Chickasaw Nation of south central Oklahoma
  3. Choctaw of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians near Philadelphia, Mississippi
Other speakers live near Tallahassee, Florida, and with the Koasati in Louisiana, and also a few speakers live in Texas and California.

Phonology

  1. The only voiced stop is. The voiceless stops,, and may become partially voiced between vowels, especially and for male speakers. Also, the voiceless stops are slightly aspirated at the onset of words and before stressed syllables, behaving like English voiceless plosives.
  2. Controversially, analyses suggest that all nouns end in an underlying consonant phoneme. Nouns apparently ending in a vowel actually have a glottal stop or a glottal fricative as the final consonant. Such consonants become realized when suffixes are attached.
  3. The distinction between phonemes and is neutralized at the end of words.

    Free variation

  1. /ɬ/, the voiceless lateral fricative, is pronounced as a voiceless dental fricative .
  2. The voiceless labiodental fricative /f/ is pronounced as a voiceless bilabial fricative .

    Phonological processes of consonants

  1. Lax vowels occur more often in closed syllables. In traditional orthography, ʋ usually indicates and u usually indicates. Exceptions include pokoli for, imalakusi for. The traditional orthography doesn't distinguish lax and tense front vowels, instead it indicates with e.
  2. Nasal vowels are intrinsically long.

    Pitch

  3. In Choctaw, very few words are distinguished only by pitch accent. Nouns in Choctaw have pitch realization at the penultimate syllable or the ultimate syllable. Verbs in Choctaw will have pitch realization at morphemes indicating tense, but sometimes, pitch directly precedes the tense morpheme.

    Syllable structure

  4. As is in the chart above, there are three syllable structure types in Choctaw: light, heavy, and super heavy. Possible syllables in Choctaw must contain at least one vowel of any quality.
  5. Syllables cannot end with a consonant clusters CC. However, there is an exception with the structure *VCC if a word in Choctaw ends with the suffix /-t/.
  6. Syllables do not begin with consonant clusters CC, but there is an exception in an initial /i-/ deletion, which results in a syllable *CCV.

    Rhythmic lengthening

Glide insertion

  1. Where V: is oo
  2. boo-a-h→bóowah
  1. Where V: can be either ii or aa
  2. talaa-a-h→talaayah

    /i-/ deletion

  1. For most vowel deletion cases, the preceding short vowel is deleted at the morpheme boundary.
  2. If a class II suffix attaches to a word that results with two short vowels occurring together, the short vowel that follows the class II suffix is deleted.

    Morphology and grammar

Verbal morphology

Choctaw verbs display a wide range of inflectional and derivational morphology. In Choctaw, the category of verb may also include words that would be categorized as adjectives or quantifiers in English. Verbs may be preceded by up to three prefixes and followed by as many as five suffixes. In addition, verb roots may contain infixes that convey aspectual information.

Verb prefixes

The verbal prefixes convey information about the arguments of the verb: how many there are and their person and number features. The prefixes can be divided into three sorts: agreement markers, applicative markers, and anaphors. The prefixes occur in the following order: agreement-anaphor-applicative-verb stem.
Agreement affixes
The agreement affixes are shown in the following chart. The only suffix among the personal agreement markers is the first-person singular class I agreement marker /-li/. Third-person is completely unmarked for class I and class II agreement arguments and never indicates number.
Some authors refer to class I as actor or nominative, class II as patient or accusative and class III as dative. Broadwell prefers the neutral numbered labels because the actual use of the affixes is more complex. This type of morphology is generally referred to as active–stative and polypersonal agreement.
Class I affixes always indicate the subject of the verb. Class II prefixes usually indicate direct object of active verbs and the subject of stative verbs. Class III prefixes indicate the indirect object of active verbs. A small set of stative psychological verbs have class III agreement subjectsthe direct object; an even smaller set of stative verbs dealing primarily with affect, communication and intimacy have class III direct object.
Active verbs
As the chart above shows, there is no person-number agreement for third person arguments. Consider the following paradigms:
  1. When the subject and object refer to the same thing or person, the reflexive ili- prefix is mandatory and used in place of the coreferent object.
Transitive active verbs seemingly with class III direct objects:
When a transitive verb occurs with more than one agreement prefix, I prefixes precede II and III prefixes:
For intransitive verbs, the subjects of active verbs typically have class I agreement. Because third-person objects are unmarked, intransitive active verbs are indistinguishable in form from transitive active verbs with a third-person direct object.
Stative verbs
The subjects of stative verbs typically have II agreement. A small set of psychological verbs have subjects with class III agreement.
Negatives
The set of agreement markers labelled N above is used with negatives. Negation is multiply marked, requiring that an agreement marker from the N set replace the ordinary I agreement, the verb appear in the lengthened grade, and that the suffix /-o-/ follow the verb, with deletion of the preceding final vowel. The optional suffix /-kii/ may be added after /-o-/. Consider the following example:
Compare this with the affirmative counterpart:
To make this example negative, the 1sI suffix /-li/ is replaced by the 1sN prefix /ak-/; the verb root iya is lengthened and accented to yield íiya; the suffix /-o/ is added, the final vowel of iiya'' is deleted, and the suffix /-kii/ is added.
Anaphoric prefixes
Reflexives are indicated with the /ili-/ prefix, and reciprocals with /itti-/:
The following examples show modal and tense suffixes like /-aachii̱/ 'irrealis', /-tok/ 'past tense', /-h/ 'default tenses':
There are also suffixes that show evidentiality, or the source of evidence for a statement, as in the following pair:
There are also suffixes of illocutionary force which may indicate that the sentence is a question, an exclamation, or a command:

Verbal infixes

Choctaw verb stems have various infixes that indicate their aspect. These stem variants are traditionally referred to as 'grades'. The table below shows the grades of Choctaw, along with their main usage.
Name of GradeHow it is formedWhen it is used
n-gradeinfix n in the next to last syllable; put accent on this syllableto show that the action is durative
l-gradeput accent on next to last syllable; lengthen the vowel if the syllable is openbefore a few common suffixes, such as the negative /-o/ and the switch-reference markers /-cha/ and /-na/
hn-gradeinsert a new syllable /-hV̱/ after the next to last syllable. V̱ is a nasalized copy of the vowel that precedes it.to show that the action of the verb repeats
y-gradeinsert -Vyy- before the next to last syllableto show delayed inception
g-gradeformed by lengthening the penultimate vowel of the stem, accenting the antepenultimate vowel, and geminating the consonant that follows the antepenult.to show delayed inception
h-gradeinsert -h- after the penultimate vowel of the stem.to show sudden action

Some examples that show the grades follow:
In this example the l-grade appears because of the suffixes /-na/ 'different subject' and /-o/ 'negative':
The g-grade and y-grade typically get translated into English as "finally VERB-ed":
The hn-grade is usually translated as 'kept on VERBing':
The h-grade is usually translated "just VERB-ed" or "VERB-ed for a short time":

Nominal morphology

Noun prefixes

Nouns have prefixes that show agreement with a possessor. Agreement markers from class II are used on a lexically specified closed class of nouns, which includes many of the kinship terms and body parts. This is the class that is generally labeled inalienable.
Nouns that are not lexically specified for II agreement use the III agreement markers:
Although systems of this type are generally described with the terms alienable and inalienable, this terminology is not particularly appropriate for Choctaw, since alienability implies a semantic distinction between types of nouns. The morphological distinction between nouns taking II agreement and III agreement in Choctaw only partly coincides with the semantic notion of alienability.

Noun suffixes

Choctaw nouns can be followed by various determiner and case-marking suffixes, as in the following examples, where we see
determiners such as /-ma/ 'that', /-pa/ 'this', and /-akoo/ 'contrast' and case-markers /-at/ 'nominative' and /-a̱/ 'accusative':
The last example shows that nasalizing the last vowel of the preceding N is a common way to show the accusative case.

Word order and case marking

When there is an overt subject, it is obligatorily marked with the nominative case /-at/. Subjects precede the verb
When there is an overt object, it is optionally marked with the accusative case /-a̱/
The Choctaw sentence is normally verb-final, and so the head of the sentence is last.
Some other phrases in Choctaw also have their head at the end. Possessors precede the possessed noun in the Noun Phrase:
Choctaw has postpositional phrases with the postposition after its object:

Examples

Some common Choctaw phrases :
Other Choctaw words:
Counting to twenty:
At "Native Nashville''" web , there is an Online Choctaw Language Tutor, with Pronunciation Guide and four lessons: Small Talk, Animals, Food and Numbers.