Muskogean languages in the context of "Gophers"

The Choctaw language (Choctaw: Chahta), spoken by the Choctaw, an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, US, is a member of the Muskogean language family. Chickasaw is a separate but closely related language to Choctaw.

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma published the New Choctaw dictionary in 2016.

Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands, Southeastern cultures, or Southeast Indians are an ethnographic classification for Native Americans who have traditionally inhabited the area now part of the Southeastern United States and the northeastern border of Mexico, that share common cultural traits. This classification is a part of the Eastern Woodlands. The concept of a southeastern cultural region was developed by anthropologists, beginning with Otis Mason and Franz Boas in 1887. The boundaries of the region are defined more by shared cultural traits than by geographic distinctions. Because the cultures gradually instead of abruptly shift into Plains, Prairie, or Northeastern Woodlands cultures, scholars do not always agree on the exact limits of the Southeastern Woodland culture region. Shawnee, Powhatan, Waco, Tawakoni, Tonkawa, Karankawa, Quapaw, and Mosopelea are usually seen as marginally southeastern and their traditional lands represent the borders of the cultural region.

The area was linguistically diverse, major language groups were Caddoan and Muskogean, besides a number of language isolates.

The Eastern Woodlands is a cultural region of the Indigenous people of North America. The Eastern Woodlands extended roughly from the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern Great Plains, and from the Great Lakes region to the Gulf of Mexico, which is now part of the Eastern United States and Canada. The Plains Indians culture area is to the west; the Subarctic area to the north. The Indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands spoke languages belonging to several language groups, including Algonquian, Iroquoian, Muskogean, and Siouan, as well as apparently isolated languages such as Calusa, Chitimacha, Natchez, Timucua, Tunica and Yuchi. Many of these languages are still spoken today.

The Natchez (/ˈnætʃɪz/ NATCH-iz, Natchez pronunciation: [naːʃt͡seh]) are a Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area in the Lower Mississippi Valley, near the present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi, in the United States. The DeSoto chronicle failed to record their presence when they came down the river in 1543. They speak a language with no known relatives, although it may be distantly related to the Muskogean languages of the Creek Confederacy. The somewhat unreliable archivist Pierre Margry (fr) recorded the identity the Natchez applied to themselves as "the Theloel". An early American geographer noted in his 1797 gazetteer that they were also known as the "Sun Set Indians".

The Natchez are noted for being the only Mississippian culture with complex chiefdom characteristics to have survived long into the period of European colonization. Other Mississippian societies in the southeast had generally experienced important transformations shortly after contact with the Spanish Empire or other settler colonists from across the ocean. The Natchez are also noted for having had an unusual social system of nobility classes and exogamous marriage practices. It was a strongly matrilineal kinship society, with descent reckoned along female lines. The paramount chief named the Great Sun was always the son of the Female Sun, whose daughter would be the mother of the next Great Sun. This ensured that the chiefdom stayed under the control of the single Sun lineage. Ethnologists have not reached consensus on how the Natchez social system originally functioned, and the topic is somewhat controversial.