Chitimacha was a language isolate — bearing no proven kinship to any other tongue — spoken by the Chitimacha people in the bayous of southern Louisiana. Across generations of contact with French, Spanish and English it borrowed scarcely any of their grammar, a sign of how separate its community kept itself.
By 1930 only two people could still hold a conversation in it: Chief Benjamin Paul and Delphine Ducloux. The linguist Morris Swadesh spent the following years recording them, leaving a grammar and dictionary that are the language’s only substantial record. Paul died in 1934 and Ducloux in 1940, and Chitimacha fell silent. Since the 1990s the tribe has taught it again from Swadesh’s notebooks, though no one has grown up speaking it since.
Worth remembering
- Through generations of contact with French, Spanish and English, Chitimacha borrowed almost none of their grammar — a measure of how separate its community held itself.
- When Swadesh arrived in the summer of 1930, just two people on earth could still converse in it; their recorded stories and songs are now the whole of what survives.
Sources
- Chitimacha is a language isolate, with no demonstrated relationship to any other language family, spoken historically along the Gulf Coast of southern Louisiana. Wikipedia
- In 1930 the linguist Morris Swadesh found the last two fluent speakers, Chief Benjamin Paul and Delphine Ducloux, and recorded extensive material that became the language's only substantial documentary record. The Conversation
- Chief Benjamin Paul died in 1934 and Delphine Ducloux in 1940, completing the language's extinction; a tribal revitalization program began in the 1990s using Swadesh's records, but has produced no first-language speakers. Wikipedia
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.