Yuchi

Yuchi is a language isolate historically spoken across the southeastern United States, in what are now Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama, with its remaining community centered in northeastern Oklahoma within the jurisdictional area of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Various linguists have proposed a distant connection to the Siouan languages since 1921, but no such relationship has been established, and Yuchi is generally treated as an isolate. Fluent speakers declined from about 15 in 2000 to a single remaining speaker by 2011, and the language's last fluent first-language speaker, Maxine Wildcat Barnett, died in 2021; the language is now formally considered extinct as a first language, though revival efforts continue, including an immersion school that opened in 2018 and roughly a dozen documented second-language speakers.