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 Spanish) languages, stems often move fluidly between syntactic categories. For example, the Ishākkoy stem koy can be translated by the verbs ‘speak’ and ‘talk’ as well as by the nouns ‘speech,’ ‘throat,’ ‘tongue,’ and ‘language.’ Other lexical elements in Ishākkoy include adverbs, pronouns, and postpositions (rather than prepositions). 

Both verbs and nouns can be marked for plural, although plural marking on nouns is not obligatory. Some verbs and nouns have special plural forms, and these are marked in an entry where appropriate.

Source: Kaufman, David V. (2022) Atakapa Ishākkoy Dictionary (Second Edition). Exploration Press.