Tonkawa

Tonkawa is a language isolate, with no proven relatives, spoken by the Tonkawa people of the southern Great Plains, whose autonym Tickanwatic means the real people. In 1601 the Tonkawa lived in what is now northwestern Oklahoma as a loose set of nomadic bands with some horticulture, and they drifted south into Texas in the late seventeenth century under pressure from the Apache and Wichita; by 1700 they had reached the Red River.

In the 1740s some bands settled at the Spanish San Gabriel missions, and in 1758 Tonkawa warriors joined the native coalition that destroyed the mission of Santa Cruz de San Saba. The language had no native script and was carried entirely by oral tradition.