LANGUAGE FEATURES

As previously mentioned, Chikashshanompa’ is part of the Western Muskogean language family.  The most closely related language to Chikashshanompa’ is Choctaw.  The two languages share a great deal of vocabulary, but there are many grammatical differences between the two (Munro, 1994 & 2005).  When the first Chickasaw dictionary, compiled by Jesse and Vinnie May Humes, was published in 1973, it represented the first time the Chikashshanompa’ had been published in written form.  Since neither of the authors were linguists, they spelled all the included words phonetically (Humes, 1973). While this dictionary was a good start, there were several inconsistencies in the spellings of the same words, as well as inclusion of words that were considered to be Choctaw by many Chickasaw speakers.  When the Munro and Willmond dictionary was published in 1994, the authors attempted to standardize the spelling system, so that each sound in Chikashshanompa’ would have just one spelling (Munro and Willmond, 1994).  In creating a standardized spelling system, or orthography, Munro and Willmond looked at other orthographies, such as that of the Choctaw language.

Chikashshanompa’ is written using the same letters as English and has many of the same sounds found in English.  One exception of this is the “lh” sound, which does not have an English equivalent.  Munro (2008) suggests that in order to make the “lh” sound, one should put their, “tongue behind their top teeth and making a breathy “h” sound” (p. 10).  Another feature of Chickasaw language is the glottal stop.  The glottal stop is denoted by “ ‘ “.  While in English, that would just look like punctuation, in Chickasaw, the ‘ functions as a consonant and has the power to change the meaning of a particular word.  For example, hilha means to dance, while hilha’ means a dancer (Munro, 2008).

The word order in Chikashshanompa’ is subject-object-verb (Munro, 2008).  For example, if one wished to say, “I see a snake” in Chikashshanompa’, the word order would be Sinti (snake) pisali (see and I are combined into one word-pisa with –li on the end translates to “I see”).  In order to make this sentence past tense, one would simply add –tok to the end of pisali.  Therefore, Sinti pisalitok translates to, “I saw a snake”.