Choctaw
Choctaw is a Muskogean language that is spoken in villages encircling Philadelphia, Mississippi, and by a separate population in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma contingent is descended from those Choctaws who were “removed” from Mississippi to Oklahoma in the late 19th Century, along with other Native American groups. The name Oklahoma is from Choctaw oklah homma “people red”. Choctaw is closely related to Chickasaw within the larger Muskogean family. Here is the website for the Mississippi Choctaws:
http://www.choctaw.org
I worked on Mississippi Choctaw for parts of two summers around 1972. I had met an Oklahomma Choctaw teacher in Exeter NH through personal contacts, and he had gotten me interested in the language. I was on a spartan budget (long bus trips from the north to Mississippi, lodging at the old Benwalt Hotel in Philadelphia for $15/week, and bumming rides out to the Choctaw villages to work with informants). By the second summer I did, at least, have a decent Uher reel-to-reel recorder. My support was from the Phillips Fund, administered by the American Philosophical Society (APS) in that other Philadelphia.
The most interesting feature of Choctaw is the relationship between the case system for independent NPs (basically, subject vs. nonsubject) on the one hand, and the pronominal-agreement system on the other. The agreement system can mark up to three arguments, which can be coarsely labeled “agent,” “patient,” and “dative.” None of these agreement categories is obligatory. Therefore there are three kinds of intransitive (A, P, and D), three kinds of transitive (AP, AD, and PD), and one kind of ditransitive.
In addition to two brief publications, a body of notebooks and especially tapes that I made are now archived and digitized at APS library (which also has other useful documents and media).
articles
1977b Choctaw cases. In: K. Whistler et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting, 204‑13. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/previous_proceedings/bls3.pdf
1980d Choctaw suppletive verbs and derivational morphology. Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics. Lawrence, Kansas.
https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/1808/542
DOI: 10.17161/KWPL.1808.542
review
2007 Broadwell, George A. Reference grammar of Choctaw. Anthropological Linguistics 49(1):70-72.
tapes archived/digitized at APS library:
http://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/object/audio%3A23252
(catalog: APSdigrec_5555, audio:23252)
http://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/object/audio%3A23255
(catalog: APSdigrec_5556, audio:23255)
http://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/object/audio%3A23254
(catalog: APSdigrec_5557, audio:23254)
http://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/object/audio%3A23253
(catalog: APSdigrec_5558, audio:23253)
http://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/object/audio%3A23256
(catalog: APSdigrec_5559 , audio:23256)
While teaching at Harvard (1977-85), I managed to get a bright young undergraduate from South Carolina named George Aaron Broadwell interested in Choctaw. He has gone on to become the authority on the language, see especially A Choctaw reference grammar (U Nebraska Press, 2006). He taught at SUNY-Albany for many years and is now the Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida.
[last update Oct 2017]