# Languages of Texas: From the Oldest to the Newest

> Before Texas was Texas, it was the loudest room on the continent. Dozens of languages — indigenous isolates with no known relatives on earth, colonial tongues, immigrant dialects built in the Hill Country and Karnes County, and post-1975 arrivals that now claim millions of speakers statewide — have all crossed this ground. Some are gone. Some are barely breathing. A few just arrived.

**By:** Marcus Bellamy Shaw  
**Published:** June 13, 2026  
**Tags:** Indigenous Languages, Texas Czech, Texas German, Texas History, Texas Languages, Vietnamese Texas

---

_* Pictured: Edmond Johnson, the last fluent speaker of the Caddo language._

Before Texas was Texas, it was the loudest room on the continent. Dozens of languages — some as old as anything spoken in the Americas, some arrived last decade — have crossed this ground. Nobody knows the exact count. Several of them vanished before anyone thought to write them down. A few died within living memory. Some are barely breathing. And a handful are still arriving.

What follows is a walk through that room, oldest voice to newest.

## **The Deep Floor: Languages Before Contact**

The oldest tongues in Texas aren't dateable the way you'd date a pottery shard. No written records. No inscriptions. But linguists and archaeologists piece together the occupation history, and what they find is a dizzying spread of completely unrelated language families sharing the same geography — which tells you these people had been here long enough to develop in total isolation from one another.

**Coahuiltecan languages** — Coahuilteco, Comecrudo, Cotoname, and a cluster of related and possibly unrelated tongues — covered the territory from San Antonio south through the lower Rio Grande and into Tamaulipas. The Coahuiltecan grouping is itself something of a scholarly convenience: many of these bands spoke languages so distinct they couldn't understand each other. Two Spanish friars documented the dominant language in mission records for administering church ritual, which is how we know anything about it at all. In 1886, the Swiss linguist Albert Gatschet traveled to Reynosa and found the last speakers: 25 Comecrudo, one Cotoname, and two Pakawa — all elderly. The clock had already run out.

**Karankawa** covered the Gulf Coast from Galveston Bay southwest to Corpus Christi Bay, the people seasonally moving between the barrier islands and the mainland. Their language is a complete isolate — nothing before it, nothing beside it, no demonstrable relatives anywhere. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca wrote the first European account of them in 1528, after his shipwrecked expedition washed ashore on what the Spanish called Malhado — Isle of Misfortune — near Galveston. He lived among them for years. About 500 Karankawa words have been preserved. The language was once declared extinct, but the Karankawa Kadla (Mixed Karankawa) are still here: two clans, one centered in Corpus Christi, one in Galveston, actively working on language reclamation. The Handbook of Texas changed its entry from "now-extinct Karankawa" to the present tense in 2020.

**Atakapa** was spoken along the upper Texas coast and into southwestern Louisiana — the Piney Woods fringe country where the land goes swampy and the bayous start. Another isolate. Also extinct as a first language. Also part of a coastline that produced languages so different from everything around them that they remain puzzles.

**Tonkawa** ranged across central Texas, between the Llano River and the Canadian River, and spoke a language that has no known relatives on earth. A complete isolate. Anthropologist Harry Hoijer documented it in the 1930s, when only six speakers remained, producing the 1933 grammar _Tonkawa: An Indian Language of Texas_ and a 2,500-word dictionary. The last first-language speakers died around 1940. The Tonkawa Tribe of Oklahoma has been working on revitalization.

**Caddo** belonged to the Caddoan language family and was spoken in East Texas — the Piney Woods, the Red River country, the territory the Caddo people called home for centuries. The word _Texas_ itself traces to the Caddo word _táysha'_, meaning "friend" or "ally." The last native Caddo speaker, Edmond Johnson, died in 2025. The Caddo Nation of Oklahoma has language classes, a dictionary app, and recordings, but the living chain of transmission is now broken.

**Wichita** — in the same Caddoan family — was spoken by the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, including the Waco and Tawakoni peoples, on the southern Plains and into North Texas. The last fluent speaker, Doris Jean Lamar-McLemore, died on August 30, 2016. The Wichita Documentation Project at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has archived recordings. Revival classes are offered by the tribe.

**Comanche** is a Uto-Aztecan language, linguistically related to the Shoshone of the Great Basin — which tells you the Comanche people migrated south from the high-country interior onto the Southern Plains sometime around 1700. They became the dominant military and trading force across Comanchería, which at its peak covered most of what is now West and Central Texas plus parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Comanche is still spoken by members of the Comanche Nation in Oklahoma. The tribe runs language preservation programs, and the language is considered critically endangered but alive.

**Lipan Apache and Mescalero Apache** are Na-Dené languages — a family that also includes Navajo and Diné. The Lipan ranged across much of South Texas and the Edwards Plateau. The Mescalero were more centered in far West Texas and New Mexico. Both Apache languages survive today in Oklahoma and New Mexico communities, with revitalization programs underway.

## **The First Contact Layer: Spanish**

Spanish arrived in what is now Texas in 1519, when Alonso Álvarez de Pineda mapped the Gulf Coast. It embedded itself permanently. The missions, the presidios, the colonial land grants — all of it was Spanish administrative infrastructure, and Spanish was the language of that infrastructure for the better part of 300 years.

Today, roughly 28 percent of Texas residents speak Spanish at home, making it the second language of the state by a wide margin. But Texas Spanish isn't monolithic: South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley have distinct varieties with deep roots in the colonial era. West Texas Spanish sounds different from San Antonio Spanish. And the Tejano speech community — descendants of Mexicans who were already living in Texas when Anglo settlers arrived — carries a historical Spanish tradition older than the state itself.

In 1834, the legislature of Coahuila y Tejas passed two related decrees a month apart. Decree No. 270 reorganized Texas into three departments — Bexar, Brazos, and Nacogdoches — giving Anglo settlers more local governing authority. Decree No. 277, the so-called Chambers Jury Law, followed in April and established a new judicial system for Texas that explicitly allowed legal proceedings, laws, and records to be kept in English for the Anglo-dominant departments. Together they're one of the few moments in early Texas legal history where the state of play on the ground was honestly acknowledged in writing.

## **Brief and Consequential: French**

French made its move in 1685, when René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, established Fort Saint Louis at Matagorda Bay — an accident of navigation meant for the Mississippi River mouth, which missed by about 400 miles. The colony was a disaster. La Salle was murdered by his own men in 1687. The survivors were eventually killed by the Karankawa. The fort rotted away.

But France didn't leave. French Louisiana pushed against East Texas for the next century, producing the missions and presidios Spain erected specifically to counter French territorial ambitions. Nacogdoches exists in part because the Spanish needed a counterweight to Natchitoches. French trappers and traders moved through the Piney Woods. And the Mobilian Jargon — the trade pidgin of the Gulf Coast, based on Choctaw and Chickasaw, used from Florida to Louisiana and into Texas — was partly sustained by the French colonial presence that needed to communicate with its indigenous neighbors.

## **The Indigenous Lingua Franca: Mobilian Jargon**

Before English, before Spanish, before any European language became the common tongue of Texas's diverse nations, there was Mobilian Jargon — a Muskogean-based pidgin that served as the trade language of the entire northern Gulf Coast. It drew its vocabulary primarily from Choctaw and Chickasaw but was not mutually intelligible with either. The Alabama, Caddo, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Atakapa, and Lipan Apache are all documented as users. French colonists, Spanish missionaries, African slaves, and British traders used it too.

It died out by the mid-20th century. By the 1980s, a few elderly Louisiana tribal members still remembered words and phrases. It's gone now — but for at least two centuries it was the working language of diplomacy, commerce, and survival across the Southeast and Gulf Coast.

## **The Nations Who Came West**

Several of the tribes on this list didn't originate in Texas. They arrived through removal, displacement, and the long forced migrations of the 18th and 19th centuries — and they brought their languages with them.

**Cherokee** — originally from the Southern Appalachians — had a Texas presence in East Texas by the early 1800s. Chief Bowl (Duwali) led a group into Texas around 1819, establishing communities near Nacogdoches. The Republic of Texas expelled them in 1839, with Bowl killed in battle that July. The Cherokee syllabary, created by Sequoyah between roughly 1809 and 1821, is one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements in North American history — a single man invented a complete writing system for a language, and within years the majority of his nation was literate in it. Cherokee is still spoken today, primarily in Oklahoma and North Carolina, with active revitalization efforts.

**Choctaw, Chickasaw** — both Muskogean languages — had speakers who passed through or briefly settled in East Texas during the removal era. Their primary territories became Oklahoma, but the East Texas borderland was a corridor. Chickasaw and Choctaw are both still spoken today in Oklahoma, with tribal language programs working to increase the number of speakers.

**Alabama and Coushatta** migrated from present-day Alabama westward into East Texas after 1763, settling in the Big Thicket area of what is now Polk County. They've been there ever since. The Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation, 17 miles east of Livingston on U.S. 190, is their home today. About 100 fluent Alabama speakers remain, mostly elders, while Koasati — the Coushatta language — is a living tongue spoken by tribal members over 20 on both sides of the Texas-Louisiana line. Young people are working to keep both alive.

**Kickapoo** has one of the stranger border stories in Texas. Originally from what is now Wisconsin and the upper Great Lakes, the Kickapoo resisted removal with a ferocity that just kept sending them further south — through Illinois, through Missouri, through Texas, eventually into Mexico. In 1852, the Mexican government gave them land in Nacimiento, Coahuila. They've been moving between Nacimiento and Eagle Pass ever since, a seminomadic pattern adapted to modern economic conditions. The Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas received federal recognition in 1983. Their reservation in Maverick County, south of Eagle Pass, sits right on the Rio Grande. Kickapoo — an Algonquian language — is spoken by essentially everyone in Nacimiento, making it one of the most intact indigenous language communities in the region.

## **The Anglo Flood: English**

English came with the empresarios. The first legal Anglo settlements arrived in Texas in the early 1820s under the colonial contracts of men like Stephen F. Austin. By the mid-1830s there were tens of thousands of Anglo settlers, and the language question was becoming a political one — Spain and then Mexico had required immigrants to speak Spanish and follow Mexican law. The settlers largely ignored both requirements.

After independence in 1836, English became the language of the Republic and then the state. Today, about 65 percent of Texas residents speak English at home. The state has no official language by law, but English dominates government, commerce, education, and media.

## **The 19th-Century European Arrivals: Texas German and Texas Czech**

German immigrants started arriving in Texas in the 1830s, a decade before statehood. They founded New Braunfels in 1845, Fredericksburg in 1846, Boerne, Weimar, Comfort — a whole band of communities across the Hill Country known, appropriately, as the German Belt. The dialects these settlers brought from different German-speaking regions blended in Texas into something new: Texas German. It borrowed English vocabulary, dropped the umlauts, simplified the grammar, and developed its own unique intonation that a native German speaker hears as distinctly American even while being unmistakably German.

By 1940, an estimated 160,000 people spoke Texas German. Then came World War II, the social pressure to demonstrate American loyalty, and a Texas law banning German-language instruction in schools. The culture collapsed. The last people to learn Texas German at home were born in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The COVID-19 pandemic thinned the surviving speaker community further. Dr. Hans Boas at the University of Texas has been documenting the dialect for decades — over 900 recorded interviews — and estimates a maximum of 3,000 speakers remain.

Czech followed a similar arc. The first organized Czech group arrived in Texas in 1851, when Josef Šilár led a party that landed at Galveston after an ocean crossing that killed half their number. Most Texas Czechs came from Moravia, not Bohemia — which is why Texas Czech sounds different from the Czech spoken in most American immigrant communities. The language was claimed, somewhat optimistically, to be the third most widely spoken language in Texas after English and Spanish in the post-World War II decades. That's long past. But the dialect is documented, the Texas Czech Legacy Project at UT Austin preserves oral histories, and Czech radio broadcasts can still be heard in Central Texas. The Czech Heritage Society of Texas keeps the kolaches coming in La Grange and West.

## **After 1975: Vietnamese**

April 30, 1975 changed everything. The fall of Saigon sent waves of Vietnamese refugees toward resettlement camps — and the nearest major ones to the Gulf of Mexico were in Texas and Arkansas. The climate felt familiar. The fishing communities along the coast offered a livelihood. Houston offered an economy. People stayed.

By 1981, Texas had the second-largest Vietnamese population of any state: 40,000 people. Today, that number is over 310,000 statewide. Greater Houston — anchored by the Bellaire Boulevard corridor known locally as Little Saigon, and communities spreading through Alief, Sugar Land, and Stafford — is home to approximately 143,000 Vietnamese Americans, the second-largest Vietnamese metro community in the country outside of California.

Vietnamese is now the third most-spoken language in Texas, behind English and Spanish. It's a tonal, Austroasiatic language with nothing linguistically in common with English, Spanish, or the European languages that previously shaped Texas. Its presence in the state is one of the most significant demographic shifts of the 20th century, and it arrived within a single decade.

## **The Modern Mosaic**

From the late 20th century onward, the Texas linguistic map started filling in with languages from every continent.

**Tagalog** — the primary language of the Philippines — arrived with the Filipino medical professionals, engineers, and military families who settled in Texas's major metros. The Philippines was a U.S. territory from 1898 to 1946, creating a Filipino American community with a complicated and long relationship with American institutions. Texas has one of the largest Filipino populations in the country.

**Mandarin and Cantonese** came in waves. Cantonese-speaking communities, rooted in 19th-century Chinese immigration to the American West, were established in Texas cities well before the mid-20th century. Mandarin followed in force with the tech industry, university research programs, and the post-1965 immigration reform that opened U.S. entry to educated professionals from Asia. Houston and Dallas each have large Chinese-American communities, with Houston's Chinatown along Bellaire — actually adjacent to the Vietnamese corridor — serving both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers.

**Hindi, Telugu, and Urdu** reflect the massive influx of South Asian professionals that accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s with the H-1B visa pipeline into Texas tech and medical industries. Telugu — the language of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana — has a particularly large community in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, where the Telugu Association of North America holds one of the largest Telugu cultural gatherings in the country. Hindi and Urdu are closely related at the spoken level, differing primarily in script (Devanagari vs. Arabic) and formal vocabulary; the communities that speak them in Texas are distinct, with Urdu tied especially to Pakistani immigrant networks, but the languages themselves are mutually intelligible in everyday conversation.

**Korean** has a long-established presence, particularly in Houston, where Korean churches serve as community anchors and where Korean-owned businesses have operated since the 1970s. The Korean American community in Texas is one of the largest in the South.

**Arabic** and **Persian (Farsi)** reflect both longstanding Arab American communities — many from Lebanon and Egypt, some with roots going back generations — and more recent Iranian immigration, much of it after 1979. Houston has a significant Iranian-American community; the city's international oil industry drew educated Iranians long before the revolution, and many stayed or sent family afterward.

**Somali and Swahili** arrived largely through refugee resettlement programs. Texas has been one of the most active resettlement states in the country. Fort Worth, in particular, has a substantial Somali community. Swahili speakers come from across East Africa — Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, Uganda — often arriving through the same refugee and immigration channels. These communities have grown substantially since the 1990s.

**Polish (Silesian)** has a Texas foothold most people don't know about. Panna Maria, in Karnes County, established in 1854, is the oldest permanent Polish settlement in the United States. About 150 families from Upper Silesia — then under Prussian rule — landed at the Gulf port of Indianola and walked roughly 100 miles inland to their land grants. They celebrated their first Mass on Christmas Eve 1854 under a live oak tree. The dialect they brought was Silesian Polish, distinct from standard Polish, and it developed its own Texas vocabulary: the Silesian word _szczyrkowa_ for rattlesnake, _piczesy_ for peaches. The Immaculate Conception Catholic Church still stands. The community is small, but it predates most of the Czech and German settlements people more readily associate with immigrant Texas.

## **What It All Means**

Texas has been a collision point for as long as humans have been here. The indigenous languages that didn't survive — Tonkawa, Karankawa, Comecrudo, Cotoname, Atakapa, and now Caddo and Wichita within the last decade — were lost through deliberate destruction, disease, and displacement. The European immigrant languages, Texas German and Texas Czech, were eroded by assimilation pressure, federal policy, and time. The newer arrivals are here because Houston is the fourth-largest city in the country, because Texas has an economy that draws the world, and because the Gulf Coast looks a lot like home to a Vietnamese shrimper.

The room is still loud. What languages are being spoken in Texas today that won't make anyone's list in 100 years? Which of the indigenous languages being revitalized right now will find their footing?

And what do you think the next language to truly take root in Texas will be?

---

**About the author:** Marcus Bellamy left Michigan in 2024 with his wife Jesi, drove south, and kept driving until the air smelled like the Gulf. They landed in Galveston and decided that was that. He writes about Texas history, culture, and the communities that make this state unlike anywhere else — a perspective sharpened by being someone who chose Texas deliberately, not by accident of birth. His interests run from Gulf Coast fishing and boating to technology, science fiction, and the kind of deep-cut local history most people scroll past. Every Bit Texas is his attempt to make sure those stories don't disappear.

---

_Read the full article at [everybittexas.com/posts/languages-of-texas-from-the-oldest-to-the-newest](https://everybittexas.com/posts/languages-of-texas-from-the-oldest-to-the-newest)_

[← All Posts](https://everybittexas.com/posts/index.md)