Muscogee language

Current status

Muscogee is the primary heritage language of the Muscogee people. The Muscogee Nation offers free language classes and immersion camps to Muscogee children.

Language programs

The College of the Muscogee Nation offers a language certificate program. Tulsa public schools, the University of Oklahoma and Glenpool Library in Tulsa and the Holdenville, Okmulgee, and Tulsa Muscogee Communities of the Muscogee Nation offer Muscogee Creek language classes. In 2013, the Sapulpa Creek Community Center graduated a class of 14 from its Muscogee language class. In 2018, 8 teachers graduated from a class put on by the Seminole nation at Seminole State College to try and reintroduce the Muscogee language to students in elementary and high school in several schools around the state.

Phonology

The phoneme inventory of Muscogee consists of thirteen consonants and three vowel qualities, which distinguish length, tone and nasalization. It also makes use of the gemination of stops, fricatives and sonorants.

Consonants

Plosives

There are four voiceless stops in Muscogee: . is a voiceless palatal affricate and patterns as a single consonant and so with the other voiceless stops. has an alveolar allophone before . The obstruent consonants are voiced to between sonorants and vowels but remain voiceless at the end of a syllable.

Between instances of , or after at the end of a syllable, the velar is realized as the uvular or . For example:

Fricatives

There are four voiceless fricatives in Muscogee: . can be realized as either labiodental or bilabial in place of articulation. Predominantly among speakers in Florida, the articulation of is more laminal, resulting in being realized as , but for most speakers, is a voiceless apico-alveolar fricative .

Like , the glottal is sometimes realized as the uvular [] when it is preceded by or when syllable-final:

Sonorants

The sonorants in Muscogee are two nasals ( and ), two semivowels ( and ), and the lateral , all voiced. Nasal assimilation occurs in Muscogee: becomes before .

Sonorants are devoiced when followed by in the same syllable and results in a single voiceless consonant:

Geminates

All plosives and fricatives in Muscogee can be geminated (lengthened). Some sonorants may also be geminated, but and are less common than other sonorant geminates, especially in roots. For the majority of speakers, except for those influenced by the Alabama or Koasati languages, the geminate does not occur.

Vowels

The vowel phonemes of Muscogee are as follows:

There are three short vowels and three long vowels . There are also the nasal vowels (in the linguistic orthography, they are often written with an ogonek under them or a following superscript "n"). Most occurrences of nasal vowels are the result of nasal assimilation or the nasalizing grade, but there are some forms that show contrast between oral and nasal vowels:

Short vowels

The three short vowels can be realized as the lax and centralized () when a neighboring consonant is coronal or in closed syllables. However, will generally not centralize when it is followed by or in the same syllable, and will generally remain noncentral if it is word-final. Initial vowels can be deleted in Muscogee, mostly applying to the vowel . The deletion will affect the pitch of the following syllable by creating a higher-than-expected pitch on the new initial syllable. Furthermore, initial vowel deletion in the case of single-morpheme, short words such as ifa 'dog' or icó 'deer' is impossible, as the shortest a Muscogee word can be is a one-syllable word ending in a long vowel (fóː 'bee') or a two-syllable word ending with a short vowel (ací 'corn').

Long vowels

There are three long vowels in Muscogee (), which are slightly longer than short vowels and are never centralized.

Long vowels are rarely followed by a sonorant in the same syllable. Therefore, when syllables are created (often from suffixation or contractions) in which a long vowel is followed by a sonorant, the vowel is shortened:

Diphthongs

In Muscogee, there are three diphthongs, generally realized as , phonemically may be .

Nasal vowels

Both long and short vowels can be nasalized (the distinction between acces and ącces below), but long nasal vowels are more common. Nasal vowels usually appear as a result of a contraction, as the result of a neighboring nasal consonant, or as the result of nasalizing grade, a grammatical ablaut, which indicates intensification through lengthening and nasalization of a vowel (likoth- 'warm' with the nasalizing grade intensifies the word to likŏ:ⁿth-os-i: 'nice and warm'). Nasal vowels may also appear as part of a suffix that indicates a question (o:sk-ihá:ⁿ 'I wonder if it's raining').

Tones

There are three phonemic tones in Muscogee; they are generally unmarked except in the linguistic orthography: high (marked in the linguistic orthography with an acute accent: á, etc.), low (unmarked: a, etc.), and falling (marked with a circumflex: â, etc.).

Orthography

The traditional Muscogee alphabet was adopted by many interpreters and chiefs as the "National Alphabet" in 1853 and has 20 letters.

Although it is based on the Latin alphabet, some sounds like c, e, i, r, and v differ from those in English. Here are the (approximately) equivalent sounds using familiar English words and the IPA:

There are also three vowel sequences whose spellings match their phonetic makeup:

Consonants

As mentioned above, certain consonants in Muscogee, when they appear between two sonorants (a vowel or m, n, l, w, or y), become voiced. They are the consonants represented by p, t, k, c, and s:

• c can sound like , the "j" in just
• k can sound like , the "g" in goat
• p can sound like , the "b" in boat
• s can sound like , the "z" in zoo
• t can sound like , the "d" in dust

Vowel length

While vowel length in Muscogee is distinctive, it is somewhat inconsistently indicated in the traditional spelling. The following basic correspondences can be noted:

• The short vowel v with the long vowel a ( vs. )
• The short vowel e with the long vowel ē ( vs. )
• The short vowel u with the long vowel o ( vs. )

However, the correspondences do not always apply, and in some words, short is spelled a, long is spelled e, and short is spelled o.

Nonstandard orthography

Muscogee words carry distinctive tones and nasalization of their vowels. These features are not usually marked in the traditional spelling, but may be indicated in dictionaries and linguistic publications. The following additional markers have been used by Martin (2000) and Innes (2004):

• Falling tone in a syllable is shown using a circumflex. In English, falling tone is found in phrases such as "uh-oh" or commands such as "stop!" In Muscogee, however, changing a verb such as acces ("she is putting on (a dress)") to âcces alters the meaning from one of process to one of state ("she is wearing (a dress)").
• Nasalization of a vowel is shown with an ogonek under the vowel. Changing the verb acces to ącces adds the imperfective aspect, a sense of repeated or habitual action ("she kept putting on (that same dress)").

Grammar

Muscogee verbs are highly synthetic, with many prefixes, suffixes, and infixes showing the person, number, and location of participants as well as the tense, aspect, and mood of the sentence. Nouns have fewer affixes, but compounding is used extensively.

Word order

The basic order of elements in a sentence is subject–object–verb.

Subjects and objects are commonly omitted when they are clear from context, so that Assēces is complete as a sentence meaning ’he/she/it is chasing him/her/it’.

The subject and object are noun phrases having words in the following order: (possessor or demonstrative) — noun — (adjective) — (numeral). Adverbs tend to occur either at the beginning of the sentence (for time adverbs) or immediately before the verb (for manner adverbs). Muscogee uses postpositions instead of prepositions.

Case

Noun phrases may be marked with clitics indicating the role of noun phrases in a sentence. The basic distinction is between subjects (which may end in -t) and nonsubjects (which may end in -n). Nonsubjects include direct objects, indirect objects, times, and places. In some situations, case marking is omitted. This is especially true of sentences with only one noun where the role of the noun is obvious from the personal marking on the verb. Case marking is also omitted on fixed phrases that use a noun, e.g. "go to town" or "build a fire".

Possession

Possession in Muscogee is expressed in two quite different ways, depending on the nature of the relationship.

A body part or family member cannot be named in Muscogee without relating it to a possessor. A set of prefixes is used in this type of relation to show the person and number of the possessor.

Nouns other than body parts and kinship terms are generally possessed with a different set of markers.

Person marking

Muscogee has three series of person markers on verbs. The agent (type I) person markers generally show the person and number of subjects that perform an action on purpose. Agent person markers are suffixed to the verb root.

The patient (type II) person markers often indicate the person and number of direct objects.

A third series of dative (type D) person markers generally shows the person and number of the indirect object.

Tenses

Verbs are listed in dictionaries in forms that end in -etv /-ita/. A verb like nesetv /nis-íta/ 'to buy' can appear in five past tense forms depending on how far back an event happened.

Other categories

Muscogee has suffixes at the ends of sentences indicating the functions of sentences. Statements end in -(e)s, questions seeking a yes or no answer end in -v, and singular commands end in -vs.

Like other Muskogean languages, Muscogee has a system of ablaut or "grades" that indicate distinctions in grammatical aspect.

Verbs in Muscogee sometimes have different forms when their subjects or objects are plural. Verbs like this generally describe position or motion.

Vocabulary