Ючи: исчезающий язык юго-востока США

Language of the Yuchi people in the southeastern United States

Yuchi is classified as a language isolate, because it is not known to be related to any other language. Various linguists have claimed, however, that the language has a distant relationship with the Siouan family: Sapir in 1921 and 1929, Haas in 1951 and 1964, Elmendorf in 1964, Rudus in 1974, and Crawford in 1979.

Yuchi is primarily spoken in northeastern Oklahoma, where Yuchi people live in present day Tulsa, Okmulgee, and Creek counties, within the Muscogee (Creek) Nation's tribal jurisdictional area. In 1997, 12 to 19 elders spoke the language out of an estimated Yuchi population of 1,500 speakers. In 2009, only five fluent speakers, whose first language was not English, remained, and in 2011 only one. This contradicts Speck's 1907 claim of one dialect.

Due to assimilation into Muscogee and English speaking culture, only a few elderly speakers of the Yuchi language remain. In 2000 the estimated number of fluent Yuchi speakers was 15, but this number dwindled to 7 by 2006, 5 by 2010, and 4 by 2013. The YLP opened the Yuchi Immersion School in 2018 where English is not spoken, despite an Oklahoma state law passed in 2010 declaring English the state's official language. The Yuchi people and language are the subject of a chapter in Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (2003), a book on endangered languages by Canadian writer Mark Abley.

The language had no standard orthography until the 1970s, when linguists James Crawford and Addie George (Yuchi) created a phonetic transliteration. Yuchi people have adopted this to write the language.

Yuchi is an agglutinative language, in which words are pieced together from pre existing morphemes to make entirely new words. The word order of the language is subject–object–verb. The language uses clitics and particles to express a variety of things, including possessives, cases, affixes, ideas, locatives, instrumentals, simulatives, ablatives, and demonstratives.

The language has 49 sounds, 38 of which are consonants, and the remaining 11 are vowels. This number is more than twice that of most Southeastern Native American languages.

Phonological variation often occurs in different kinds of morphological environments. For example, the phoneme is often pronounced as in 1st person singular and impersonal 3rd person pronouns by Big Pond speakers. Also, the phonemes and can become in unstressed environments.

Vowel length indicates grammatical function, such as superlative or comparative adjective forms or emphasis. It may also indicate contracted morphemes, and thus is not a phonological process but rather a morphological one.

Like many Indigenous languages of the Americas, Yuchi grammar is agglutinative. Words are formed by the addition of various prefixes and suffixes to a stem. Yuchi features separate male and female registers and an idiosyncratic noun classification system wherein nominal distinction is made regarding animacy, Yuchi ethnicity, kinship and, for inanimate nouns, shape or spatial position. Much of the information in this section is drawn from Wagner (1938); some of Wagner's conclusions, particularly regarding his interpretation of Yuchi kinship terminology and certain aspects of his description of Yuchi pronouns, have been disputed.

The Yuchi verb consists of a mono or polysyllabic stem modified almost exclusively by suffixing. Yuchi features attributive verbs, which is to say that the language makes very little distinction between verbs and adjectives as parts of speech. For this reason, Yuchi verbs and adjectives are virtually identical.

The relationship between an action and the instrument by which it is carried out is expressed via the prefix hi This prefix has become fused in some cases with certain verb stems, forming a sort of instrumental verbal compound of idiomatic meaning.

An entire verbal complex can be negated using one of two prefixes, na or ha , both of which are identical in meaning.

In direct speech wherein the sentence does not begin with an interrogative pronoun, interrogatives are formed with the suffix le. If the question implies some action in the future, the suffix yi is used instead.