Siouan Language Family

The Siouan language family is primarily spoken today in the American Great Plains and in the southern part of Canada. It originally consisted of 17 languages, of which many are either extinct or severely endangered today. Linguists think that the Siouan people migrated over a thousand years ago from North Carolina and Virginia to Ohio. Some went down the Ohio River to the Mississippi and up to the Missouri rivers, while others crossed Ohio on their way to Illinois, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Canada. The reasons for the migration are not known. The name Sioux is a truncation of a longer form Nadouessioux, the Ojibwa pejorative term for Siouan people.

According to Ethnologue, the Siouan language family has the following membership:

Catawba
Catawba	extinct	South Carolina
Siouan Proper
Central
Mandan	probably extinct	North Dakota
Iowa-Oto	extinct	Oklahoma, Kansas
Assiniboine	250	Canada
Dakota (Sioux)	15,355	Nebraska, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Montana, Canada.
Lakota	6,000	Nebraska, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Montana, Canada
Stoney	1,000 to 1,500	southern Alberta, Canada
Kansa	probably extinct	Oklahoma
Omaha-Ponca	severely endangered	Nebraska (Omaha), and Oklahoma (Ponca)
Osage	probably extinct	Oklahoma
Quapaw	severely endangered	Oklahoma
Ho-Chunk (Winnebago)	230	Wisconsin, Nebraska
Missouri Valley
Crow	4,280	Montana
Hidatsa	severely endangered	North Dakota
Southeastern
Biloxi	extinct	Mississippi
Ofo	extinct	Mississippi
Tutelo	extinct	Mississippi

 

Status

The great majority of Siouan languages are either already extinct or on the brink of extinction. Catawba, Mandan, Iowa-Oto, Kansa , Osage, Biloxi, Ofo, and Tutelo are already extinct. Only Dakota, Lakota, Stoney, and Crow have over 1,000, and only Dakota has over 10,000 speakers.

• Dakota
  of the 15,000 speakers of Dakota, there were only 31 are monolinguals, according to the 1990 census (Ethnologue).
• Crow
  Majority of older Crow people speak the language, but no young children do.
• Hidatsa
  Only a few elders speak Hidatsa today, but but some young people are trying to learn their ancestral language.
• Ho-Chunk
  The language has been in decline but there is a vigorous language revival program underway.
• Omaha-Ponca
  Most speakers are elders, but some young people are working to keep their ancestral language alive. Omaha-Ponca Population includes 60 speakers of Omaha (1993 V. Zeps), and 25 fluent speakers over 60 and a few semi-fluent speakers of Ponca.
• Osage
  Only a handful of elders in Oklahoma still speak the Osage language today, but some young people are trying to learn their native language. In 1997, there were 5 speakers of Osage out of an ethnic population of 15,000.

 

Siouan words in English

Three states have names that came from Siouan languages.

Dakota	from the name of a Siouan people.
Minnesota	from Dakota mnisota, “cloudy water, milky water,” in reference to the Minnesota River.
Kansas	variant of Kansa, native name of a Siouan people

 

Dialects

There is some disagreement about whether some Siouan languages are separate languages of dialects of the same language.

• Dakota and Lakota are so closely related that some linguists consider them dialects of the same language. There are some differences in pronunciation, but speakers can usually understand each other.
• Stoney and Assiniboine are closely related, but people speaking them cannot understand each other well, so despite their similarities, most linguists consider them separate languages.

 

Structure

 

Sound system

Consonants and vowels usually alternate in Siouan languages. Clusters do not exceed two consonants and usually occur at the beginning of words. Most words end in a vowel.

Vowels

Siouan languages usually have both oral and nasal vowels. For example, Lakota has five oral and three nasal vowels. An oral vowel is a vowel in which all air escapes through the mouth. In nasal vowels, some of the air travels escapes the nasal cavity as well in addition to the mouth.

 

Consonants

Siouan languages have a large inventory of consonants that feature aspirated/ unaspirated, voiced/voiceless, geminated, glottalized and ejective sounds.

 

Grammar

The most important word in all Siouan languages is the verb. All the other parts of the sentence are built around it. Siouan verbs carry affixes that refer to participants, i.e., the subject, direct object, or indirect object. Siouan languages form compound verbs by prefixing a noun, an adverb, or another verb to the basic root, e.g., waya’wa “to attend school” + gli‘ “to come home” produces a compound verb stem waya’wa-gli‘ “to have come home from school.”

Verbs fall into several classes according to their participant types: impersonal (no participants), stative (one object), active intransitive (one subject), transitive (subject and direct object), and ditransitive (subject, direct object, indirect object).

 

Word order

The basic word order is Subject-Object-Verb.

 

Vocabulary

Siouan languages tend not to borrow words from other languages. Instead, they make new words from native elements. For example, the Lakota word for “sugar” is c^haNhaN’pi“, literally “tree juice”.

Below are the numbers 1-10 in three of the largest Siouan languages.

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Dakota	wancha	nonpa	yamni	topa	zaptan	s’akpe	s’akowin	s’ahdoghan	napchinwanka	wikchemna
Lakota	wanji	nupa	yamni	topa	zaptan	s’akpe	s’akowin	s’aglohan	nepchunka	wikchemna
Crow	hawate	nupe	dawi	cope	tsexo	akawa	sa’pua	nupu’pi	a’pie	pireke

Below are some common words in these three languages.

	Dakota	Lakota	Crow
man	wicaa	wica	bacheé
woman	winyan	winyan	já
sun	wi	wi	áxxaashe
moon	hanwi	hanyewi	bilítaachiia
water	mini	mini	bilé

 

Writing

All Siouan languages are written with various adaptations of the Roman alphabet devised by Christian missionaries. To date, most orthographies have not been standardized. Most orthographies do not accurately represent the sound systems of the Siouan languages.

The printed literature in Siouan languages includes religious works, school textbooks, grammars, and dictionaries, and a variety of other publications.

 

Difficulty