Adai (also Adaizan, Adaizi, Adaise, Adahi, Adaes, Adees, Atayos) is the name of a people and language that was spoken in eastern For other uses, see Louisiana (disambiguation). Louisiana is a southern state of the United States of America. It uses the U.S. postal abbreviation LA. The state is bordered to the west by the state of Texas, to the north by Arkansas, to the east by the state of Mississippi... Louisiana.

The Adai were among the first peoples in North America to experience European contact—the Adai were profoundly affected. In 1530 Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (c.1490-c.1559) was an early Spanish explorer of the New World and remembered as a protoanthropological author. A factor in the notorious Narváez expedition, he was one of four survivors of shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico, and later enslaved by... Cabeza de Vaca writes of them using the name Atayos. The Adai subsequently moved away from their homeland. By 1820, there were only 30 persons remaining.

Language

The Adai language is a A language isolate is a natural language with no demonstrable genetic relationship with other living languages; that is, one that has not been proved to descend from a common ancestor to any other language. Commonly cited examples include Basque, Ainu, Burushaski, and Japanese, although in each case a minority of... language isolate unrelated to any other language. It was previously proposed that there was a connection between Adai and the The Caddoan languages are a family of Native American languages. They are spoken across the Great Plains of the central United States, from North Dakota to Oklahoma. Arikara is spoken on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota; Caddo, Wichita, and Pawnee are presently spoken in Oklahoma; Kitsai is extinct... Caddoan languages, but this now seems unlikely.

Adai is now extinct.

Bibliography

• Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.