Historically, they lived in what is now known as the southeastern United States, including eastern Tennessee, western Carolinas, northern Georgia, and Alabama, during the period of early European colonization.

Many speakers of the Yuchi language became allied with the Muscogee Creek when they migrated into their territory in Georgia and Alabama.

Various linguists have claimed, however, that the language has a distant relationship with the Siouan family: Sapir in 1921 and 1929, Haas in 1951 and 1964, Elmendorf in 1964, Rudus in 1974, and Crawford in 1979.

In the early 18th century, they moved to northwestern Georgia in the southeastern United States, under pressure from the powerful Cherokee in Tennessee.

He said that adjectives are not expressed with number, but nouns are, by the addition of the particle ha (coming from the original term wahále 'many'), which made the word essentially plural.

published a work entitled Euchees: Past and Present, providing more current information regarding the language.

Due to assimilation into Muscogee and English-speaking culture, only a few elderly speakers of the Yuchi language were left by the 21st century.

[10] Her sister, Maxine Wildcat Barnett, was the last tribal elder to speak fluent Yuchi, passing away August 27, 2021.

The phonemic inventory, those sounds which contrastively mark differences in meaning, are highlighted in the list below the vowel charts.

There are various other exceptions, but the two mentioned above are the most frequent and the most important in helping us to understand why Yuchi nouns often appear to have irregular stress patterns.

In order for a syllable to be contracted, it must begin with a [+sonorant] consonant, that is, a voiced sound with a relatively free passage of air.

For example, consider the following word:[29] /nɛ/ can contract here because it is an unstressed syllable beginning with a sonorant: [di ˀlɛ mp ʔá jɛ].

CCC clusters are relatively rare, occurring in only six variations as noted by Wolff,[30] four of them beginning with fricatives; such a construction as above would therefore likely be odd to speakers of Yuchi.

[31] The language had no standard orthography until the 1970s, when linguists James Crawford and Addie George (Yuchi) created a phonetic transliteration.

[36] The language uses clitics and particles to express a variety of things, including possessives, cases, affixes, ideas, locatives, instrumentals, simulatives, ablatives, and demonstratives.

[39] The concept of temporal verb inflection is only weakly realized in Yuchi[40] and corresponds more closely in some cases to aspect rather than tense.

The first, which usually denotes intentions or events of the immediate future, is expressed by lengthening, stressing and nasalizing the final syllable of the verb stem.

[43] Nouns are classified according to a broad animate versus inanimate paradigm[44] which is expressed using a variety of article suffixes.

The first of these includes all humans belonging to the Yuchi tribe, and is itself further divided according to a very complex system of kinship relations and gendered speech registers.

[45] The animate (Yuchi) suffixes express a very complex system of kinship and gendered speech,[46] in much the same way as do third person pronouns.

[50] Except in a few emphatic forms,[40] the pronoun is always suffixed to a verb or noun stem, and appears in eight distinct sets.

[52] Third person pronouns follow a complex pattern of kinship and gendered speech that corresponds very closely to the animate noun suffixes.

[55] It otherwise functions identically to the Subjective Series; the two pronoun sets are distinguished by their relative positions within the verb complex.

Plural reflexive pronouns demonstrate clusivity in the first person, and are identical to non-reflexives in terms of kinship and gendered speech.

This prefix has become fused in some cases with certain verb stems, forming a sort of instrumental verbal compound of idiomatic meaning.

Similar in some ways to the English preposition, these prefixes denote the location or direction of the verb's action.