Atakapa Ishākkoy

About

This Atakapa Ishakkoy Living Dictionary is an electronic version of the Atakapa Ishākkoy Dictionary (2nd edition) by linguistic anthropologist David Kaufman, published by Exploration Press 2022 and created in close collaboration with Ishāk community members. Kaufman's dictionary was based on materials collected by Albert S. Gatschet and John R. Swanton in the early 20th century. The linguistic data was imported to this online platform in 2024-2025 by David Kaufman in collaboration with researchers Anna Luisa Daigneault and Diego Córdova Nieto at Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Interns Devika Menon, Alex Mussomeli and Andrew Fowler provided assistance with digital data entry. About the Ishāk The (Atakapa) Ishāk are a North American Indigenous group, many of whom still inhabit their traditional homeland along the Gulf of Mexico in what is now southwestern Louisiana and eastern Texas. They have been in this region since before the European invasions of the sixteenth century. Ishāk history is closely intertwined with the history of the Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) and the history of Creole Louisiana. Zydeco is said to have developed out of traditional Ishāk musical tradition (Singleton 1996). The Ishāk language, also called Ishākkoy or Yukhíti Koy, described in this book, is a now dormant isolate language with no surviving linguistic relatives. Modern Ishāk prefer to call themselves Atakapa Ishāk or simply Ishāk, meaning “person” or “people.” Ishāk also call themselves Yukhíti, a general term for “Indian” or Native person. The name Atakapa is an exonym bestowed upon them by Western Muskogean language speakers meaning ‘maneater,’ due to the supposed Ishakkoyan custom of ritual cannibalism, evidence of which is lacking and may actually refer to “the specter of enslavement by the Ishāk that other Indigenous Nations of the Gulf South feared” (Darensbourg and Price 2021, 14). Such labels as “cannibal” were sometimes also applied as a way of othering…

Grammar

The first known vocabulary taken down of an Ishakkoyan language was by the French sea captain John Bérenger in the eighteenth century while venturing through Galveston Bay near modern Houston. Kimball incorporated Béranger’s short vocabulary of Orkokisak, a people who lived on Galveston Bay, into his grammar. Swanton believed that the Han, first noted by Cabeza de Vaca as living at the eastern end of Galveston Island in 1528, were probably Ishakkoyan (the term Han possibly being from the Ishākkoy word aņ ‘house’) (Swanton 1940, 136). Ishākkoy, like many other North American Indigenous languages, is structurally agglutinative and moderately polysynthetic. This means that many grammatical elements are affixed, or attached, to a head word, usually a verb. Thus, an entire sentence in English may be conveyed by a single word in Ishākkoy. For example, nhúo ‘I see you,’ contains n -, the second-person singular object prefix (you), hu the verb ‘see,’ and - o the first-person singular subject suffix pronoun (I), thus three words in English form a single word in Ishākkoy. In extreme cases a single Ishākkoy word can become quite long as it encapsulates an entire English sentence, such as shakináwshkohháhulat ‘they didn’t want to let them in’ and nshokyáhkohshhásh ‘you don’t want to eat.’ The usual sentence structure is subject-object-verb (SOV), that is, the verb is normally phrase-final, although the data show many exceptions to this, with sentences often appearing in subject-verb-object (SVO) order (whether this was an accepted Ishākkoy variant word order or arose through contact with Indo-European [French, Spanish, and/or English] influence is unknown at this point). Ishākkoy makes no clear distinction between stems that we call in English nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. (Adjectives are actually stative verbs in Ishākkoy.) Grammatical categories are generally defined by their morphosyntactic form, but, unlike in English and other Indo-European (e.g., French and…