page_title: Chickasaw language
section_title: Current status
hierarchical_section_title: Chickasaw language / Current status
caption_attribution_description: English: Language offerings for audio tours at the Chickasaw Cultural Center, including Chickasaw, English, and Spanish.
context_page_description: The Chickasaw language is a Native American language of the Muskogean family. It is agglutinative and follows the word order pattern of subject–object–verb. The language is closely related to, though perhaps not entirely mutually intelligible with, Choctaw. It is spoken by the Chickasaw tribe, now residing in Southeast Oklahoma, centered on Ada.
  The language is currently spoken by around 50 people, mostly Chickasaw elders who grew up with the language. Due to boarding schools in the 20th century and Chickasaw removal from their homeland in the 19th century, the widespread knowledge about the language and culture amongst the nation has largely decreased.
context_section_description: Emily Johnson Dickerson, the last monolingual speaker of Chickasaw, died on December 30, 2013. Ethnologue estimated in its seventeenth edition that Chickasaw retained up to 600 speakers, but noted that this figure was rapidly declining because most speakers are 50 and older. Children are no longer acquiring the language, indicating Chickasaw has a notably low vitality. As of 2014, there were "four to five confident conversational speakers who are under the age of 35." The Chickasaw language is not much used outside of the home. In terms of conservation and language vitality, Ethnologue evaluates the current language situation as moribund,  and UNESCO lists Chickasaw as a "severely endangered" language, also noting that most of the ~50 speakers (as of 2019) are over fifty and almost all are bilingual in English.
caption: Language offerings for audio tours at the Chickasaw Cultural Center, including Chickasaw, English, and Spanish.
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