_The Mobilian Trade Language_ by James M. Crawford, Knoxville: The Univ.
of Tennesee Press, 1978.
"What is Mobilian?" by Mary R. Haas, in _Studies in Southeastern
Indian Languages_ ed. by James M. Crawford, Athens: the Univ. of Georgia
Press, 1975.
The first one is very strong on tracing historical references to Mobilian
and contains a long vocabulary list, but has little in the way of
grammatical descripiton. Rather, his main thrust is to
explore the interesting controversy as to whether
or not Mobilian had a pre-colonial existence. A quote that differs in some
details from (and probably corrects) William Read, whom I cited in an
earlier posting, follows (p.8):
"Almost from the beginning of the settlement of Louisiana by the French in
1699, missionaries, settlers, officers, and others remarked that the language
of a particular tribe was the most extensive in the region and that it served
as the general language of communication. The French soon began to call this
language _(le) Mobilien_, or _la langue mobilienne_, after the tribe of the
Mobile Indians. ... Most writers who did not call the general language
_Mobilien_ (or Mobilian, if writing in English) referred to it as the
language of the Chicakasaw ... American writers of the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries have called it the Chickasaw trade jargon, the Mobilian
(trade) jargon, or simply Mobilian. Some of the people in Louisiana who know
of its former use and who remember a little of it call it either the old
language or _yama_, which, they say, means "yes" in the old language."
He continues:
"During the French hegemony in Louisiana, Mobilian was spoken throughout
the colony at least as far north as the Ohio River. its area was extended
westward into Texas by the migration there of tribes pushed out of
Louisiana by the expansion and increase of colonists, first French, but
later American. It is not known to what extent Mobilian was spoken along the
eastern margins of the colony. It was spoken in parts of West Florida and
by the tribes north of West Florida at least as far as the junction of the
Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers. It may have been spoken as far east as the Creek
towns on the Chattahoochee River although there is no evidence to substantiate
this."
Mike Picone
University of Alabama