Mobilian Jargon

Mobilian Jargon, pidgin, or trade language with limited vocabulary, based on Choctaw and Chickasaw, languages of the Muskogean family that were originally spoken in what is now the southeastern United States (see American Indian languages; Southeast Indian).

Although it is named for the Native American people whom early 18th-century French settlers called Mobile (and for whom the colonials named their settlement near present-day Mobile, Ala.), the language was not developed by the Mobile people. It may have originated as a means of communication between Native Americans from different linguistic groups, but scholars do not know if it predated French colonization.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, Mobilian Jargon served as a lingua franca for Native Americans and many of the outsiders with whom they interacted, including traders, missionaries, settlers, and slaves. Indigenous and European American fur traders probably spread the use of the language to areas outside the Choctaw and Chickasaw territories, and it was eventually used as far west as eastern Texas and as far north as southern Missouri.

Although most of its vocabulary came from Choctaw and Chickasaw, Mobilian Jargon was not mutually intelligible with those languages; it also included words from other Muskogean languages and from Algonquian, French, Spanish, and English. Like another Amerindian pidgin, Chinook Jargon, Mobilian Jargon was gradually replaced as a lingua franca by English and by the mid-20th century had died out.

Mobilian Jargon required no subject and object affixes on the verb and used free pronouns in an invariant object–subject–verb constituent order in a sentence, as in šonak eno banna ‘I want money’ (literally, ‘money I want’) and yamaeno anompole ‘I speak Mobilian’ (literally, ‘Mobilian I speak’). Like Chinook Jargon, it was thus less polysynthetic than the languages from which it had evolved. Muskogean languages use such affixes concurrently with free subjects and objects but combine the free constituents according to the pattern subject–object–verb complex, the verb complex consisting of the verb and its affixes. Mobilian Jargon also used a separate word after the verb to mark tense, whereas Muskogean languages use a suffix.