The Muscogee language (Muskogee; Muskogee: Mvskoke [maskókî]), previously referred to by its exonym, Creek,[3] is a Muskogean language spoken by Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole people, primarily in the US states of Oklahoma and Florida.

Historically, the language was spoken by various constituent groups of the Muscogee or Maskoki in what are now Alabama and Georgia.

[5] The College of the Muscogee Nation offers a language certificate program.

[12] In 2018, 8 teachers graduated from a class put on by the Seminole nation at Seminole State College to try and reintroduce the Muscogee language to students in elementary and high school in several schools around the state.

The phoneme inventory of Muscogee consists of thirteen consonants and three vowel qualities, which distinguish length, tone and nasalization.

[16] The obstruent consonants /p t t͡ʃ k/ are voiced to [b d d͡ʒ ɡ] between sonorants and vowels but remain voiceless at the end of a syllable.

[19] Like /k/, the glottal /h/ is sometimes realized as the uvular [χ] when it is preceded by [o] or when syllable-final:[18] The sonorants in Muscogee are two nasals (/m/ and /n/), two semivowels (/w/ and /j/), and the lateral /l/, all voiced.

[18] Sonorants are devoiced when followed by /h/ in the same syllable and results in a single voiceless consonant:[21] All plosives and fricatives in Muscogee can be geminated (lengthened).

For the majority of speakers, except for those influenced by the Alabama or Koasati languages, the geminate [ww] does not occur.

There are also the nasal vowels /ĩ ɑ̃ õ ĩː ɑ̃ː õː/ (in the linguistic orthography, they are often written with an ogonek under them or a following superscript "n").

[27] Nasal vowels may also appear as part of a suffix that indicates a question (o:sk-ihá:n 'I wonder if it's raining').

Although it is based on the Latin alphabet, some sounds are vastly different from those in English like those represented by c, e, i, r, and v. Here are the (approximately) equivalent sounds using familiar English words and the IPA: There are also three vowel sequences whose spellings match their phonetic makeup:[29] As mentioned above, certain consonants in Muscogee, when they appear between two sonorants (a vowel or m, n, l, w, or y), become voiced.

The following additional markers have been used by Martin (2000) and Innes (2004): The general sentence structure fits the pattern subject–object–verb.

Case marking is also omitted on fixed phrases that use a noun, e.g. "go to town" or "build a fire".

In some languages, a special form of the noun, the genitive case, is used to show possession.

In Muscogee this relationship is expressed in two quite different ways, depending on the nature of the noun.

Again, even though the construction in English would be redundant, the proper way to form the possessive in Muscogee must include the correct preposition: Toskē em efv = Toske's dog.

That is grammatically correct in Muscogee, unlike the literal English translation "Toske his dog".

The most distinct dialect of the language is said to be that of the Florida Seminole, which is described as "rapid", "staccato" and "dental", with more loan words from Spanish and Mikasuki as opposed to English.