Sitimaxa

Chitimacha, known to its speakers as Sitimaxa, is a language isolate of the Louisiana bayous, spoken by the Chitimacha people of the Atchafalaya Basin west of the lower Mississippi. The name Chitimacha is said to mean people of the Grand River. Its speakers were settled agriculturalists who grew corn, beans and squash in riverside villages and traveled in dugout cypress canoes.

They had lived on the Louisiana coast for some two and a half thousand years when French raiders entered their country in the late seventeenth century; the long war that followed ended with peace in 1718, by which time disease and fighting had sharply reduced their numbers. The language had no native script and was handed down orally.