I guess this isn't exactly a .
& When I can find somebody innocent enough to ask me this, it's usually
phrased more nearly like &Just what the [censored] is a Siouxan language, anyway?&& OK,
first thing - no x.& In
yes, but not in Siouan.
& We're going for , and the x
would completely mess this up.& The x in Siouan is not only silent, it's invisible.
The Comparative Siouan Dictionary project has renamed the Siouan family
Siouan-Catawban.& Siouan constitutes what was formerly termed Western Siouan or
Siouan proper, while Catawban is what was termed Eastern Siouan.& The older
terminology led to several problems.& First, the Ohio Valley branch of Western Siouan
is often called Southeastern Siouan, and it has been awkward to have a branch of Western
Siouan, as opposed to Eastern Siouan, that rejoices in the name Southeastern Siouan.&
People tend to expect Southeastern Siouan to be part of Eastern Siouan, not
Western.&&
Second, the term Siouan is constantly being used in the literature in ways that actually refer to Western
Siouan only, due to the paucity of information on Eastern Siouan and the rarity of study
of what information there is. & For example, we cannot at present say much about
proto-Siouan except in the sense of proto-Western Siouan, and, in fact, what everyone has
always called proto-Siouan is just proto-Western Siouan.& The members of the
Comparative Siouan Dictionary project have therefore restricted the term Siouan to Western
Siouan, and invented a new name, Catawban, for Eastern Siouan, which, after all, consists
mainly of Catawba, with only the abbreviated Woccon materials and some placenames to
represent the rest of this once numerous branch.&
The western branch of Siouan-Catawban, or Siouan (in the new and strict sense) consists
of three subgroups, Crow-Hidatsa (also known as Missouri River), Central Siouan, and Ohio
Valley (also known as Southeastern).&
My approach here deals with the vexed question of Mandan by grouping it with Mississippi
Valley as Central.& This is perhaps the current consensus, or perhaps it
isn't, for Siouanists tend,
historically, to waver on whether Mandan stands alone or belongs with either Crow-Hidatsa
or Mississippi Valley.& Mandan certainly has something in common with both Crow-Hidatsa and
Mississippi Valley.& I tend personally to feel that the resemblances to Crow-Hidatsa
are due to prolonged and intimate contact with it - borrowing, in short - while the Mississippi Valley-like
traits are inherited, even though some of them, involving motion verbs, for example, are
probably Mississippi Valley innovations.& Presumably Mandan separated from Mississippi
Valley after these innovations, which must then be regarded as Central Siouan
innovations.&&&&
The comparably vexed question of the position of Tutelo vis-a-vis Mississippi Valley
and Biloxi-Ofo has been resolved by Giulia Oliverio in favor of Biloxi-Ofo.& Thus
Ohio Valley Siouan consists of Tutelo plus Biloxi-Ofo. &Previously some
placed Tutelo with Biloxi-Ofo like this, while others thought in might be a
separate branch of Siouan or even part of something like Central Siouan (with or
without Mandan).& At contact Tutelo was in
Virginia, Biloxi was in Mississippi, and Ofo was in Arkansas.& There is some reason
to believe that they may have arrived at these locations from the Ohio Valley in
comparatively recent times.&
The Siouan-Catawban Family Tree
Mississippi Valley is the most complex of the divisions of Siouan. &
It consists of what amounts to four dialect groups, Dakotan, Dhegiha,
Ioway-Otoe-Missouria, and Winnebago, except that:
the rather less divergent dialects of Dakotan are usually
called dialects, while
the rather more divergent dialects of Dhegiha
are usually called languages,
and the not very well attested dialects of Ioway-Otoe-Missouria
(aka Chiwere) are usually ignored, while&
Winnebago has not had any known dialect divisions
within its recorded history, perhaps because of the severe reduction in Winnebago numbers
attested to have occurred in the seventeenth century.& There may well have been
several dialects within Winnebago before
this date.&&
The dialects of Dakotan (also known as Sioux or Dakota) fall into five
subgroups -Teton, Santee-Sisseton, Yankton-Yanktonais, Assiniboine, and Stoney -
extent reflecting the political divisions of the speakers.&The Dhegiha languages are Omaha-Ponca,
Kansa (also known as Kaw), Osage, and Quapaw (also known as Arkansas), again reflecting political
divisions.&
There is no really satisfactory name for Ioway-Otoe-Missouria, and the
present relict of this language is a group of family lects (varieties) reflecting
the merger of the former tribal dialects, and, to some extent, of the tribal
populations themselves.
&The original dialects of Ioway-Otoe-Missouria are unknown, but certain
lexical and phonological variations
are considered to represent Ioway (also Iowa) usage vs. Otoe (also Oto) usage.&
Not surprisingly, Missouria is also known as Missouri.
The language of the three combined groups is sometimes
termed Chiwere, a spelling variant of Jiwere, which is actually a self-designation of the
Otoe.&& I've noticed I tend to say Ioway-Otoe(-Missouria) for the
language and Chiwere for the branch, even though they are effectively the same
thing.& Chiwere is also applied to the combination of Ioway-Otoe-Missouria and Winnebago (also known
as Chiwere-Winnebago).&&
Readers should be aware that the Wisconsin branch of the Winnebago is currently lobbying for
Hocak as the English term for the tribe and its language.& This is actually a
representation of Hochank (NetSiouan Hoc^aNk), written in a modern Siouanist Orthography, but shorn of the hacek
over the c and the ogonek (nasal hook) under the a.& The Hocak Language Project
diacritics, but they recognize that you might not have them handy and consider it OK
to omit them in that case.& I haven't heard how the Nebraska Winnebagoes
feel on either score.& The observed difficulty of explaining to the
uninitiated how to pronounce Hocak - hoe-CHONK, not HOE-cack - tends to recommend to me a
practical English spelling of Hochank (or Hochangara,
with the enclitic noun marker =ra).& &&
All this aside, the term Winnebago is well established in
English and hasn't any offensive meaning (or no more so than Chicago, anyway), so it seems
harmless and reasonable as an English term for the tribe and its language.& The
Winnebagoes are simply one of a number of peoples known in English for historical reasons
by a name rather divergent from their native name (cf. German for Deutsch, Hungarian for
Magyar, etc.).&&&
Most students of Mississippi Valley adopt an analysis of its subgrouping
in terms of repeated bifurcations, into Dakotan vs. Dhegiha-Chiwere-Winnebago, with
Dhegiha-Chiwere-Winnebago then divided into Dhegiha and Chiwere-Winnebago, and
Chiwere-Winnebago then divided into Chiwere and Winnebago.& I have been championing
an analysis in terms of a dialect continuum for proto-Mississippi Valley, with the dialect
clusters arranged linearly in the order Dakotan, Dhegiha, Chiwere, and Winnebago.& I believe
that there are cross-cutting innovations that preclude the bifurcating analysis, e.g., the
causative formation seems to suggest Dakota-Dhegiha vs. Chiwere-Winnebago.&
several sound changes apply in gradients consistent with the linear order
postulated for the continuum.&
The easiest way to learn to speak a Siouan language well is to have parents or
grandparents who speak it well, and spend the first 7 or 8 years of your life around them
listening to them speak it constantly.& (Then after that you keep on
listening if you want to become a good story-teller and orator.)& It helps if the television and radio are
mostly off, or at least not used as babysitters.& There's probably no harm in
learning English at school, but it helps if your school friends speak the language, too,
and if the school and your school friends are positive about it.& In fact,
it's probably essential that any friends you hang out with prefer to speak the
same Siouan language.&&
Never worry about English.& It's
impossible not to learn English in this country.& Lots of people around the world
learn to speak it as a second language superbly, and everybody considers their accents
charming, right?& Which language would you rather know best?& If you
try to learn the Siouan language as a second language you'll probably give up on it in
a few weeks as too hard, but you won't be able to give up on English, even if
you want to.&&
Of course, sadly, the natural immersion method isn't easy to arrange these days, so
you're probably going to have to supplement whatever you can learn from your older
relatives with a little book learning or self-study.& However, please treat your elders as
your primary source and don't miss a chance to be around them.& Not even a really
great grammar is going to catch all the details you'd normally pick up automatically as a
a side effect of listening to your elders speak.& No linguist believes English is
fully described, and how many thousands of books are there about it?& Listen to your
elders while you can.&
I've been saying grammars.& I really should say 'published descriptions of
grammars'.& All language have grammars, whether anyone has bothered to notice it or
not.& Grammars are what's in your head that enables you to speak and
understand a language.& But the sad truth is that a lot of Siouan languages don't have any published
descriptions of their grammars.& For some of them it's largely too late to do
anything about this.& So, for a given Siouan language there may be essentially no
available information at all.& For example, most of the Catawban branch of Siouan has been reduced to a list of
place names, and then there's that :&
two suspicious sentences.& More favorably there may be some information, but no coherent description at all (Ofo,
Woccon).&&
In good cases the descriptions may be excellent as far as they go (Teton), but
based on next to nothing in the way of data (Tutelo), or they may be based on firsthand
data but be awkward, superficial, and incomplete, or crippled by a poor descriptive model
(Ioway-Otoe), or they may be unpublished (Omaha-Ponca), or only in somebody's
head (Kansa), or obscurely published (Ioway-Otoe again).& Sometimes it's a little of all three - a weak, unpublished description
that's scarcely better than none.& I name no names, because I'm not in a position to
do any bragging about my own record.&&
By the way, what passes for well-published for
a Siouan language would be something like the Government Printing Office (Dakotan,
Hidatsa), the defunct King's Crown Press (Winnebago), an academic journal like the
International
Journal of American Linguistics [a/k/a
IJAL] (Mandan, Ioway-Otoe), an
out of print academic series
(Catawba, Crow, Dakotan), or a dissertation (Crow, Mandan, Osage, Tutelo,
Winnebago).& And did you know that not all dissertations can be ordered from
(now Bell &
Howell)?& Try getting Robert Hollow's Mandan dissertation there, or
Susman's Winnebago dissertation!&& Both are excellent, by the
The point is, you may have to do a little grubbing around to locate what material there
is.& You won't want to limit yourself to things with 'grammar' or 'description' in the
title.& You have to accept things designed for linguists instead of real people,
often antique linguists.& In most cases what you'll have to settle for as
reference materials is a mixed bag of obscure and incomplete grammars, grammars of closely
related languages, conference papers, texts of varying quality, dictionaries (if you're
lucky), dictionaries of related languages (you're still lucky), wordlists, and
ethnographic literature with words mentioned in passing.& Everyone will
spell things a different way, if they have any notion of spelling consistently at
You'll be in the best shape if
you want to study the Teton dialect of Dakotan.& If you don't, you'll probably have
to anyway, because you'll need to refer to materials on Teton to get an idea of how to
deal with things that aren't described for the language you want to study.& You
very good at adapting on the fly to new orthographic systems, and you may get so you can
do things like looking
up Kaw words via their probable equivalents in an Osage dictionary starting in either the Osage or the English list at
need.& You have to be a little careful because the meaning may have changed more than
the form.&& And, of course, the word may just be missing.&&
By the way, always look in both sides of the dictionary.& They are often
not fully equivalent to each other.& And if you are lucky enough to have a
dictionary with sample sentences, check the samples for words that aren't
otherwise in the dictionary.&&
Having gathered the materials, you study the clearer grammars, then the more obscure
ones.& At some point you begin to tackle any texts you can find and you translate
them, or, ideally, verify the available translation, word by word, sentence by sentence,
page by page, with a speaker until things start to make sense.& If you
can't find a speaker, ponder them yourself.& You may eventually start trying
to rewrite the
grammars you like most in terms of what you have learned about the language
you're studying.& This might entail
converting one that applies to one language to one that applies to another.& Dorsey's
manuscript grammar of Omaha-Ponca is adapted from Riggs' grammar of Santee
Dakotan, for example.& (So, you can see that the process I'm describing
isn't new!)& Eventually you get to the point where you think you can make up new sentences.& If
you're lucky there will be an occasional older speaker around for you to try them out on.&&
This is the philological or 'written materials' approach to learning a
language.& If you have access to native speakers of the language, you can replace or
supplement it by asking them to translate words, phrases, and sentences into the language.
& This is the first stage of the 'fieldwork' approach.& By comparing the English
(or whatever) and the Siouan language versions of well-chosen examples you can deduce the
various units (morphemes, words, phrases, ...) of the language and the grammatical rules for combining them.&& Linguists spend 5-10
years learning how to construct well-chosen examples.&&
The main difference between the
philological approach and the fieldwork approach is that you can, in principle, get whatever examples you
need in the latter.& In the philological approach you are limited to whatever is in your texts. &You can easily come up with questions that the texts can't clear up.&
As a simple example,
the Dorsey 1890 & 1891 Omaha-Ponca texts attest es^e's^e 'you keep saying', but
have nothing for 'I keep saying', 'we keep saying', or 'he keeps saying'.& I
noticed this gap after
my all-too-brief Omaha-Ponca fieldwork.&&&
references I prepared for the
recommended by Jimm GoodTracks.&
references in the
is available online.&&
Well, my own answer would be, not nearly as many as it would be nice to have, but
certainly enough to make it interesting.& However, on a serious note, the conclusion
of Douglas Parks and Raymond DeMallie on behalf of the Dakota Dialect Survey has
five major dialects, to wit,& Santee-Sisseton, Yankton-Yanktonais, Teton,
Assiniboine, and Stoney.& This analysis appears in Sioux, Assiniboine, and Stoney
dialects:& a classification in Anthropological Linguistics
The new five-dialect classification replaces the hitherto standard three dialect
analysis based on the shibboleth term for the language in the various dialects - Dakhota,
Lakhota, Nakoda (or Nakhota).& In the old three-dialect analysis the three supposed
dialects are usually named with those terms - in English spelling Dakota, Lakota, Nakoda
(or Nakota) - or, somewhat more abstractly, they can be termed d-, l-, and
n-dialects.& They are also sometimes called Santee, Teton, and Assiniboine (or Stoney
or& Assiniboine-Stoney).&
Apart from a recognition that there are five dialects, i.e., that there are major
divisions within what have hitherto been regarded as the d- and n-dialects, another
important correction resulting from the Survey has been the finding that Yanktonais fits
firmly with Yankton, rather than with Assiniboine and Stoney.& Yanktonais is actually
very similar to Yankton, as the names might suggest:& Yanktonais or
IhaNk'thuNwaN=na
'Little End-Villager' is a diminutive of Yankton or
IhaNk'thuNwaN 'End-Villager'.
& Both are d dialects, i.e., they use d for Proto-Siouan *R.& In that
respect they agree with Santee-Sisseton, the other d-dialect.& It turns, out,
of course, that both having d for *R is not particularly significant, compared with things
like Santee-Sisseton wic^hasta 'man' vs. Yankton-Yanktonais and Teton wic^has^a,
or Santee-Sisseton /hd/ for *kR vs. Yankton-Yanktonais /kd/, as in Santee-Sisseton
hdepa vs. Yankton-Yanktonais
vs. Teton glepa, all 'vomit'.&&
In the same way, the old n dialect classification turns out to have two rather different
components, Assiniboine and Stoney.& There is some suspicion that the divergence of
Assiniboine and Stoney might be comparatively recent, but it is real enough.&
An informally published article by Allan Taylor points out that recordings of
Stoney from the 1700s resemble modern Assiniboine.&&
A better shibboleth for the five dialect system might be the treatment of the first
person of yu- verbs, like yuha ' to have'.& The first person (formed
by prefixation, of *w to *ru-, modern yu-) is mdu- or bdu- in Santee-Sisseton,
in Yankton-Yanktonais, blu- in Teton, mnu- in Assiniboine, and just
mu- (with loss of n) in Stoney. &Unfortunately, this pattern doesn't hold for any simple nouns.& For
example, the term for 'lake' is mde or bde in Santee-Sisseton, bde
in Yankton-Yanktonais, ble in Teton, mne in Assiniboine, and still
not *me, in Stoney.&&
The initial md cluster forms are attested from the last century, but I don't
believe they occur today.& I don't know if this is a sound change or a
difference in perception of the same thing.& English speakers often have
difficulty perceiving& nasality vs. orality in Siouan sonorants (w and r sounds and
their relatives), and also with identifying the precise quality of r and l (or n
and d and edh, etc.)
By the way, I recommend Dakotan, with that final -n, as a cover term for the several
dialects.& Dakota is ambiguous, since it could refer only to Santee(-Sisseton) or
Yankton(-Yanktonais) or to both together.& Adding the -n assimilates the term to English morphology
and makes it clear that it is being applied to all of the dialects collectively.&&
In passing, I don't know of any claims that any Dakotan dialects have
disappeared within the contact period.&&
It's not actually an error, as the
brings out.
The various Dakotan dialects have different developments of the sound *R in the
Proto-Siouan language.& This *R was some kind of r-like sound.& Not r proper, since
there is another sound that was clearly *r.& That develops into y in Dakotan,
confusingly enough, while *R yields l, d, or n, depending on the dialect.& So,
Proto-Siouan *rut-
yields modern Dakotan yu'ta, and *Rek-s^it- yields deks^i' ~
leks^i' ~ neks^i'.&&(Just for the sake of completeness,
*y yields c^h.& So *yaNt- yields c^haNte'.& In clusters *r
sometimes behaves as *R.& And if the next vowel is nasal, reflexes of *r or
*R& may appear as n.& There are a few additional wrinkles to the
situation, but I digress ...)&&&
The more easterly dialects of Dakotan or Dakota (properly Dakhota,
as the k is aspirated, but the t is not), pronounce the modern descendent of *R as
&These dialects - Santee-Sisseton and Yankton-Yanktonais - were encountered first,
and their version of the term, Dakhota, spelled in a more English compatible way
as Dakota or Dacota,& was borrowed into English to provide things like the state names North
Dakota and South Dakota, or the city name Dakota City (in Nebraska, of course).&
Actually, the French met the Dakota well before the English and have had a great deal
to say about the spelling of the term in European languages.&&
The westerly dialect -
Teton - pronounces the *R as /l/, and so has Lakhota (or Lakota, often preferred in
English by analogy with Dakota).&
The more northerly Assiniboine and Stoney dialects
have /n/ for *R, leading to Nakoda.& In these dialects the unaspirated stops
voice and the aspirates and ejectives merge as voiceless stops, so Nakoda represents
the pronunciation well.& Sometimes &Nakhota& is used by scholars by (false)
analogy with Dakhota and Lakhota.&&&
Since there are more
speakers of Teton than the other dialects (today, anyway) the variant Lakhota is
actually more common than Dakhota in actual use among speakers of Dakotan
dialects, while Dakota, for historical reasons, is preferred in English.&&
These comments apply mostly to Omaha-Ponca.
A surprising number of people are interested in collecting stock polite
expression like 'hello', 'goodbye', 'please', or 'thank you' in as many
languages as possible.& So far I haven't had a request for 'gesundheit',
but I expect it's only a matter of time.& Nor have I run into anyone
collecting impolite expressions, like 'get lost' or - well, others.& That's
probably a good sign.&&&
I've indicated at times that I no longer like to provide these.& It's
interesting the first couple times, but it gets tiresome, and mainly because I
usually have to spend a good deal of time explaining why this is difficult to
do.& Essentially there are two problems - cases where there is no
corresponding polite formula in Omaha-Ponca, and cases where the formulas differ
by sex or some other conditioning factor that inquirers haven't taken into
account.&&&&
So here is my one time explanation of the polite expressions in Omaha-Ponca,
so far as I know them.&&
Male to male(s):& Ahau'!& (sounds like /aho/ to English
Among others:& EaN'=niya! 'How are you?'& This literally
means 'how are you?'.& The response would be U'doN=bdhiN. 'I'm
I've also seen mention of Ea'thaN=niya! essentially 'Is anything wrong
for you?' or maybe 'What's up?& What's the matter?', but I've not heard
this in my limited exposure to speakers.
The male-to-male greeting or acknowledgement is ritual and required, but I'm
not sure if the others are required, or if they are borrowings.&&Kathy
Shea says that EaN'=niya! is normally an actual polite inquiry into the
other's health among the Ponca..&&
Kathy Shea also reports among the Ponca an exchange on the order of Dhathi'=a?&
'Are you here?' or 'Have you arrived here?' to which the response is AN'haN,
athi'. 'Yes, I've arrived.'& In the plural, Dhathi'=i=a? 'Are
you-all here?'& AN'haN, aNga'thi=i.& 'Yes, we're here.'
Luckily, these greetings only indicate the sex of speaker and hearer, a
sociological matter, rather than a grammatical one.& In Osage the usual
expressions immediately invoke the whole Dhegiha shape/posture-based gender
system - &How are you (sitting/lying/standing/moving)?& - and must be difficult to cover even in introductory Osage classes, let alone in casual
'Goodbye!'
One might say something along the lines of Agdhe'=hau! 'I'm off, I'm
going home.', but this is not required, and I assume that one would substitute
the relevant motion verb for gdhe' 'go home' if one were doing something
else, e.g., Bdhe'=hau! 'I'm going there' if simply heading to another
place.&& Simply leaving without a word was said to be perfectly
acceptable and normal, though I'm sure that it was made reasonably clear that
one was going if that was important.&&
It's not that speakers of Omaha-Ponca& or other Native American
languages are impolite.& My impression is that, on the average, they're at least as polite
as I am, and often much more so. & I've often come away from
an encounter with Omahas feeling rather boorish.& It's just that ritual
greetings and partings are not an essential part of polite behavior.& I've
confirmed with others that this situation is fairly typical of the Northeastern and
North-Central Plains
parts of North America.& I'm not sure how far it might extend beyond this
area.& Don't assume anything.& The cultural variety of indigenous
America is enormous.&&
To make a polite request in Omaha-Ponca, put it in the future tense (properly, the irrealis
or 'unreal' mode) by adding the irrealis enclitic =tte to the verb, e.g.,
Nathe'=tta! 'Please eat it!'& Literally this is something like 'Will
you eat it?& or '(Maybe) you will eat it.'& There's no use of an
additional fixed phrase like 'if it
please you' or 'I pray you' or of worn down development of these like 'please
(you)' or 'prithee'.& At a feast, it would be normal to express the
sentiment above in the imperative, e.g., Wadhatha=i=ga=hau! '(Everybody)
Kathy Shea reports that instead of formulas like 'may I' or 'could I', e.g.,
'May I make myself some coffee?' one simply states the proposition, MaN'kkaN
sa'be du'ba akki'gthize tt[am]iNkHe. 'I'm going to get myself some
coffee.'& The response is E'gaN. 'Alright.'.&&
'Thank you!'
Wi'bdhahaN!& Literally this means 'I make entreaties
for you', from gi'dhahaN 'to entreat on behalf of'.& The phrase is conventionally translated 'I will pray for you'.&&&One
might also shake the hand of a benefactor.& It's essential to recall favors
and return them appropriately.&&
In what I understand to be fairly profound cases of gratitude it is appropriate to
extend the arms, palms down, toward the person(s) you are thanking.& I
remember a woman so old her arms had to be supported for her making this gesture
to the attendees at a funeral.&&
In Dorsey's texts exclamations of the form Ha!&
(kinterm in the vocative)!& Ha! occur, evidently with a somewhat similar degree of
profoundness.& It's possible that a modern male speaker might substitute Hau!,
since a shift from /a/ to /au/ has occurred in a number of particles in male
And, since I brought them up:
'Gesundheit!& Bless you!'
No equivalent noted.&&
Male:& Gu'=di=ga=hau!& 'Further away!'
Female:& Gu'=di=(y)a!& 'Further away'
Other Impolite Expressions
Of course, it's not easy to learn these when you're a somewhat modest
outsider among polite people, there being some questions a stranger can't easily
ask.& I've noticed that even the most thorough of the early ethnographers
failed to collect the terms for ladies' underthings, for example, and I'm
surprised only because I know that Dorsey really was very thorough about
clothing and that people spoke frankly with him on a variety of questions.&
There's a fair amount of Latin in the stories he collected, and one that
amounted to an obscene joke was even left unpublished in the archives.& The
maidenly Alice Fletcher failed even to obtain the terms for the body parts covered
by underthings.& As a student of Siouan languages seeking such expression
for comparative purposes, however, I have learned to check the early sources for 'loincloth', which is usually literally
'penis cover'.
However, this sort of problem aside, I'd have to say there really is nothing
that would pass for swearing or cursing or obscenity in European terms in the
Omaha and Ponca texts collected by Dorsey.& The nearest equivalents are
occasional exclamations of GaN! 'Such!' or S^aN! 'Completely!' or S^i'=s^te!,
which is '(Unknown)=soever!'.&& The unknown might be s^i' 'again'
or simply an exclamatory syllable.& A somewhat remote possibility is a
development of obsolete *s^i'ge 'bad', but I tend to doubt
You are the 47222nd visitor since this subpage
was created 06/02/01.
Copyright (C) John E. Koontz. All rights reserved.
Revised: August 28, 2003.}