Coushatta (language)
| Coushatta | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
United States of America ( Elton, Louisiana and Livingston, Texas ) | |
| speaker | 200 | |
| Linguistic classification |
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
nai (indigenous languages of North America) |
|
| ISO 639-3 |
cku |
|
Coushatta or Koasati is a North American Indian language and belongs to the Muskogee language family . The language is spoken by the Coushatta , most of whom live in Allen Parish north of the city of Elton, Louisiana . A smaller number share a reservation near Livingston, Texas with the Alabama Indians . The linguist Geoffrey Kimball estimated the number of Coushatta speakers to be around 400, of which around 350 live in Louisiana (Kimball 1991).
Coushatta is most closely related to the Alabama language , but although the Coushatta and Alabama have historically lived very closely together, their languages are no longer mutually understandable without familiarization. The language is also related to the Hitchiti Mikasuki language , and some Coushatta speakers claim that they were able to understand Mikasuki without much time to get used to it.
A special feature of Koasati is that men and women use different grammatical forms of the verbs.
credentials
- Geoffrey D. Kimball: Koasati Grammar . University of Nebraska Press et al., Lincoln NE et al. 1991, ISBN 0-8032-2725-6 .
- Geoffrey D. Kimball: Koasati Dictionary . University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE et al. 1994, ISBN 0-8032-2726-4 .