Atakapa

Atakapa was the language of the Atakapa, or Ishak, people of southwestern Louisiana and coastal eastern Texas in the United States. It is generally treated as a language isolate, though various linguists have proposed grouping it with neighboring languages such as Chitimacha and Tunica in a wider Gulf family, a connection that has never been proven. The language existed in Eastern and Western dialects, with the Western variety better documented through fieldwork by Albert Gatschet and John R. Swanton in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it fell out of use in the early twentieth century, though descendant communities have pursued revitalization efforts since the late 2010s using the surviving documentation.