Natchez was the language of the Natchez people of the lower Mississippi, a true isolate with no proven relatives. It ran against the grain of almost every other language: it marked voicing in its sonorants but not its obstruents, the mirror image of the usual pattern, and it carried a special grammatical register that storytellers slipped into when they spoke the lines of cannibal characters in winter tales.
After the Natchez were scattered by war in the eighteenth century, survivors lived among the Muscogee and Cherokee, and the language narrowed to a handful of keepers. Nancy Raven, the last fluent speaker, worked with the linguist Mary Haas in the 1930s before she died in 1957; Watt Sam, the other, had died in 1944. What the two of them gave Haas is most of what the language now is.
Worth remembering
- A true isolate, it marked voicing in its sonorants but not its obstruents — the reverse of the pattern in nearly every other language.
- Storytellers switched into a special grammatical register to voice cannibal characters in winter tales, a feature Mary Haas recorded from the last speakers in the 1930s.
Sources
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.