Natchez

Natchez was the language of the Natchez people of the lower Mississippi valley in what is now Mississippi and Louisiana, spoken before the destruction of the Natchez chiefdom by French colonial forces in the 1730s scattered its speakers among neighboring peoples, who were later removed to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears. It is generally treated as a language isolate, though some linguists have proposed a distant relationship to the Muskogean languages, and its phonology distinguishes voicing in sonorant consonants but not in obstruents. Most of what is known of the language comes from fieldwork conducted by the linguist Mary R. Haas with its last fluent speakers, Watt Sam and Nancy Raven, in the 1930s; Raven's death in 1957 is generally cited as the language's extinction, though small-scale revival efforts have continued since.