Chitimacha

Chitimacha was the language of the Chitimacha people of southern Louisiana in the United States, historically spoken along the Gulf Coast from the Mississippi River delta west to the Texas border. It is treated as a language isolate, and a recently proposed link to the wider Totozoquean family of Mexico has not been accepted by most linguists. The language became extinct as a native tongue in 1940 with the death of its last fluent speaker, Delphine Ducloux, though it had already been extensively documented by the linguists Morris Swadesh and John R. Swanton through grammars, a dictionary and recorded texts; since the early 2000s the Chitimacha tribe has pursued a revival program including classroom instruction and a new dictionary drawing on that earlier documentation.