Chitimacha language
Chitimacha is a language isolate historically spoken by the Chitimacha people of Louisiana, United States. It became extinct in 1940 with the death of the last fluent speaker, Delphine Ducloux.
Although no longer spoken, it is fairly extensively documented in the early 20th-century work of linguists Morris Swadesh and John R. Swanton. Swadesh in particular wrote a full grammar and dictionary, and collected numerous texts from the last two speakers, although none of this is published.
Language revitalization efforts are underway to teach the language to a new generation of speakers. Tribal members have received Rosetta Stone software for learning the language. As of 2015, a new Chitimacha dictionary is in preparation, and classes are being taught on the Chitimacha reservation.
Chitimacha has recently been proposed to be related to, or a member of, the hypothetical Totozoquean language family. An earlier, more speculative, proposal suggested an affinity with the also hypothetical group of Gulf languages.
Phonology
Brown, Wichmann, and Beck give the following phoneme inventory based on Morris Swadesh's 1939 analysis.Consonants
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | i iː | u uː | |
| Mid | e eː | ə | o oː |
| Open | a aː |
Grammar
Chitimacha has a grammatical structure which is not dissimilar from modern Indo-European languages but it is still quite distinctive. Chitimacha distinguishes several word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives, quantifiers, demonstratives. Swadesh states that the remaining word classes are hard to distinguish but may be divided "into proclitics, postclitics, and independent particles". Chitimacha has auxiliaries which are inflected for tense, aspect and mood, such as to be. Polar interrogatives may be marked with a final falling intonation and a clause final post-position.Chitimacha does not appear to have adopted any grammatical features from their interactions with the French, Spanish or Americans.
Pronouns
Verbs are inflected for person and number of the subject. Ambiguity may be avoided by the use of the personal pronouns, but sentences without personal pronouns are common. There is no gender in the personal pronouns and verbal indexes. Subject and object personal pronouns are identical.| Person | Chitimacha | English |
| 1st person singular | ʔiš | "I" / "me" |
| 2nd person singular | himʔ | "thou" |
| 3rd person singular | hus | "he" / "she" / "him" / "her" / "it" |
| 1st person plural | ʔuš | "we" |
| 2nd person plural | was | "you" |
| 3rd person plural | hunks | "they" / "them" |
Pronouns are more restricted than nouns when appearing in a possessive construction. Pronouns cannot be proceeded by a possessive unlike nouns.
Nouns
There are definite articles in Chitmacha. Nouns are mostly uninflected, there are only approximately 30 nouns which distinguish a singular or plural form through a plural suffix or other formations.Nouns are free, or may be possessed by juxtaposing the possessor and the possessed noun.
ʔiš ʔinž̹i = my father
was ʔasi ʔinž̹i = that man's father