Natchez

Natchez is the language, usually treated as an isolate, of the Natchez chiefdom of the lower Mississippi valley, whose ancestors were the mound-building Plaquemine culture.

Some linguists posit a distant link to the Muskogean family, but no wider relationship has won acceptance. Its grammar used active-stative alignment and subject-object-verb order, and storytellers kept a special cannibal-speech register for oral tales.

Closest to Natchez were the Taensa and Avoyel, fellow Plaquemine descendants, while the Yazoo, Koroa and Tiou were neighbours whose speech is barely recorded. French colonists under La Salle met these peoples from 1682, and Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz wrote down Natchez words in the early 1700s; after the Natchez revolt of 1729 and the French destruction of the chiefdom in the 1730s, surviving speakers took refuge among the Chickasaw, Creek and Cherokee.