The Muscogee language (also Muskogee , ), previously referred to by its exonym, Creek, is spoken by Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole people, primarily in the US states of Oklahoma and Florida.
Muscogee was historically spoken by various constituent groups of the Muscogee confederacy in what are now Alabama and Georgia. In the early 18th century some Muscogee speakers began to join speakers of Hitchiti-Mikasuki in Florida. Combining with other ethnicities there, they emerged as the Seminole. During the 1830s, the US government forced most Muscogee and Seminole to relocate west of the Mississippi River, with most forced into Indian Territory. Muscogee was still spoken in the town of Oketeyeconne in Southwest Georgia until the mid 1950s.
Muscogee is today spoken by fewer than 400 people, most of whom live in Oklahoma and are members of the Muscogee Nation and the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Some speakers of Muscogee are also members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The variety of Muscogee spoken by Seminoles in Oklahoma is sometimes referred to as "Seminole". Among Seminoles in Florida, Hitchiti-Mikasuki is the dominant language, however.
Muscogee belongs to a family of languages known as Muskogean. Muscogee is related to, but not mutually intelligible with, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Alabama, Koasati, Apalachee, and Hitchiti-Mikasuki.
Dialects The three main dialects of Muscogee are Muscogee proper (used in the Muscogee Nation), Oklahoma Seminole Muscogee, and Florida Seminole Muscogee. The most distinct dialect of the language is said to be that of the Florida Seminole, which is described as "rapid", "staccato" and "dental", with more loan words from Spanish and Mikasuki as opposed to English. Florida Seminole Muscogee is the most endangered variety of the Muscogee language. +Dialect differencesMuscogee properOklahoma Seminolecufonwvesropottvneedlekvpe’sokkoskvsoap Claudio Saunt, writing about the language of the later 18th century, said that there were different feminine and masculine versions, which he also calls dialects, of the Muscogee language. Males "attach[ed] distinct endings to verbs", while females "accent[ed] different syllables". These forms, mentioned in the first (1860) grammar of the Muscogee language, persisted in the Hichiti, Muscogee proper, and Koasati languages at least into the first half of the 20th century.
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 + Consonant phonemes of Muscogee Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Median Lateral Nasal Plosive Fricative Approximant
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: {| |in-coko | |'his or her house'
|tokná:wa | |'money'
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: {| |oh-leyk-itá | |'chair'
|ohɬolopi: | |'year'
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: {| |camhcá:ka | |'bell'
|akcáwhko | |'a type of water bird'
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:
Front Central Back Close Close-mid Open
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: {| |pó-ɬki | |'our father' |- |opónɬko | |'cutworm'
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: {| |in-ɬa:m-itá | |'to uncover, open' |- |in-ɬam-k-itá | |'to be uncovered, open'
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 and 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 ( 'warm' with the nasalizing grade intensifies the word to 'nice and warm'). Nasal vowels may also appear as part of a suffix that indicates a question ( '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:
Spelling Sound (IPA) English equivalenta ~ like the "a" in fatherc ~ like the "ch" in such or the "ts" in catse like the "i" in hitē like the "ee" in seedf like the "f" in fatherh like the "h" in hatchi ~ : like the "ay" in dayk like the "k" in skiml like the "l" in lookm like the "m" in moonn like the "n" in moono ~ ~ like the "o" in bone or the "oo" in bookp like the "p" in spotr a sound that does not occur in English but is often represented as "hl" or "thl" in English spellings. The sound is made by blowing air around the sides of the tongue while pronouncing English l and is identical to Welsh ll.s like the "s" in spott like the "t" in stopu ~ like the "oo" in book or the "oa" in boatv ~ like the "a" in aboutw like the "w" in wety like the "y" in yet
There are also three vowel sequences whose spellings match their phonetic makeup:
Spelling Sound (IPA) English equivalent eu similar to the exclamation "ew!". A combination of the sounds represented by e and u ue like the "oy" in boy vo ~ like the "ow" in how
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 ("she is putting on (a dress)") to 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 to 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. +Basic order of subject, object, and verbEfvtposelvstēnassēces.ifá-tpó:silást-i:-ná:ssi:c-ísdog-SUBJECTcatblack-DURATIVE-NONSUBJECTchase.LGR-INDICATIVEThe dog is chasing the black cat. 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