Chickasaw-Choctaw

Chickasaw-Choctaw denotes the Western branch of the Muskogean family, whose two chief languages, Choctaw and Chickasaw, are so close that some linguists treat them as dialects of one tongue. Both peoples recall descending from a single ancestral group, and before European contact the Chickasaw had moved east of the Mississippi into what is now northeastern Mississippi, while the Choctaw settled across Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

Around 1700 a simplified pidgin drawn mainly from Choctaw and Chickasaw, Mobilian Jargon, became the lingua franca of the Gulf coast and lower Mississippi, used by many peoples and absorbing words from French, Spanish and English.

A Roman-based Choctaw orthography was devised under the United States civilization program early in the nineteenth century, and in the 1830s both nations were forced west to Indian Territory, carrying the languages into Oklahoma.