Siouan Languages

The Lakhota language, like many other Native American languages, faces a decline in young speakers. Can the culture exist independently of a language and can the people have the same feeling of belonging to it even after the language has been lost? The following study analyzes the relation of language and identity in a situation when most members of a tribe are no longer able to speak the language. It is based on interviews with 52 participants carried out on Pine Ridge Reservation. The study compares the opinions of speakers of the language with the non-speakers with the objective to find out what alternative signs of identity people use when they are not able to speak the language. The analysis focuses on the attitude to the language, it is trying to answer the question whether it is necessary to speak the language to be Lakhota and what do the people think about the eventuality that the language might disappear completely.

Proto-Siouan-Catawban productively formed pluractionals from verb stems by full stem reduplication. Every branch of the family exhibits reflexes of this process, although these have often been affected by semantic extensions and morphological contractions. The semantic changes exhibited support the hypothesis that reduplication always starts out directly iconic and acquires other senses through cross-linguistically common semantic extensions or external influence. The morphological changes exemplify a natural lenition sequence:

full reduplication > partial reduplication > no reduplication

which, like phonetic lenition chains, can be used to aid historical reconstruction.

The Proceedings of the 39th Siouan and Caddoan Conference follows the meeting of the 39th Siouan and Caddoan Language Conference from May 30-31, 2019 at Northeastern State University in Broken Arrow, OK.  This volume was published on July 31, 2020 in through the Northeastern State University Department of Languages and Literature and edited by Ryan M. Kasak, Samiron Dutta, and Justin T. McBride.

The papers are copyright of their original authors and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0).

The Proceedings of the 38th Siouan and Caddoan Conference follows the meeting of the 38th Siouan and Caddoan Language Conference from June 7-9, 2018 at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, IL.  This volume was published on July 12, 2019 in Chicago, IL by the Northeastern Illinois University Linguistics Department and edited by Ryan M. Kasak.

This work represents the first time in over three decades that the conference produced a proceedings volume. The papers are copyright of their original authors and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0).

Mandan [ISO: mhq] is a Siouan language traditionally spoken in northwestern North Dakota on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The language no longer has any L1 speakers, and fewer than a dozen L2 speakers remain. This dissertation provides a description of the phonological and morphological systems of the language, as well as contextualizes these systems within a formal framework. The data come from an assembled corpus of over five hundred pages of transcribed traditional narratives and twenty hours of recordings of those narratives done in the 1970s, which is supplemented by data from more recent fieldwork done in the early 2010s and by the author. Mandan features a system of templatic morphology, whereby affixes are ordered according to a proscribed order and whose linear order does not align with the semantic scope of those affixes. This dissertation proposes a morphologically-motivated reason for how these affixes come to appear in the order they do. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the Mandan people and their language. The ethnographic content of this chapter shows the relationship between the Mandan people and the Upper Missouri region of the Great Plains, and the unfortunate decline in their population due to their status as organizers of one of the largest hubs of trade near the center of the North American continent and the successive waves of smallpox epidemics brought to their villages due to this trade. After discussing previous research on the Mandan languages, the chapter concludes by posing three questions regarding whether affix order in Mandan is truly unmotivated and if not, why affixes appear where they do within the verbal template. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the phonological inventory of Mandan, describing its consonants and vowels, as well as providing a look at phonetic characteristics of Mandan consonants. This overview includes an analysis of several phonological processes that are blocked by some non-featural element in the vicinity of preverbs, and the chapter concludes by ruling out phonology as a motivating factor for affix order. Chapter 3 identifies and describes individual affixes and clitics found on Mandan verbs. This description of verbal morphology includes reanalysis of elements previously considered to be mark tense, but which actually mark aspect or evidentiality. Further analysis on postverbal elements reveals that Mandan has an extensive enclitic field rather than a large number of suffixes. Ordering of these enclitics can change depending on semantic scope, but the ordering of prefixes remains unchanged. The conclusion of this chapter states that a syntactic approach also cannot yield a convincing result for why the prefix field is ordered the way it is, so there must be a factor beyond phonology

In Lakota (Siouan) nouns (N) frequently occur adjacent to stative verbs (SV). Extant descriptions of Lakota grammar treat the <N+1SV> as a syntactic compound in which the SV modifies the N. The present study offers a novel analysis that shows that the N and SV are uncompounded and that postnominal modification occurs only when the <N+SV> sequence is RP-internal, whereas in the clause-final position it functions as a complex predicate. This analysis solves numerous outstanding issues from several areas of Lakota grammar including modification, modifier phrases, noun incorporation, inalienable possession, compounding,
word-formation, stress position, referentiality, and information structure.

Onomastic and ethnographic evidence suggests that the Indigenous group that came to be called Biloxi (autonym Tanêks) was likely only a small detachment of a much larger ancestral population of Ohio Valley Siouans that lived to the north in the Appalachian highlands and Cumberland Plateau region of what are now modern eastern Tennessee, Kentucky, and southwestern West Virginia. Much of this hypothesis is based on onomastic linguistic evidence, that is, place-names and proper names attested in the literature that show high likelihood of being of Ohio Valley Siouan (OVS) origin rather than, as is often speculated, of Cherokee or other affiliation.

A lack of ancient written records is no impediment to establishing genetic relationships between languages at great time depths. While scholars like Sapir (1929) have proposed genetic groupings based on particular lexical similarities, other scholars have utilized a multifaceted approach to arguing for relatedness by comparing both lexical items and morphological material, given the fact that the latter is less prone to change over time than the former (Goddard 1975; Vajda 2010). This paper assesses Rankin's (1996; 1998) earlier analysis of the plausibility of a relation from common descent between Siouan-Catawban and Yuchi, which is currently considered by most an isolate. By comparing cognates and establishing possible sound correspondences, and by examining the peculiarity of the verbal template with respect to the placement of the first person plural marker vis-à-vis the preverb and verb, and the use of nasal ablaut in Yuchi to mark future tense that is similar to iŋ-ablaut in Dakotan languages, this paper builds upon Rankin's original case for a genetic link between Yuchi and Siouan-Catawban. While more constrained in scope than Chafe's (1976) Macro-Siouan proposal, this paper adds to the body of support for Siouan-Catawban and Yuchi sharing a common ancestor.

The article analyzes an areal polysemy ‘earth/year’ in the languages of North America. The distribution of the trait largely coincides with the cultural region of California. Within this area, the polysemy ‘earth/year’ is attested from Molala in the north to Seri in the south. The trait in question is apparently old in Yuman, Chumashan and Yuki-Wappo, whereas Uto-Aztecan languages acquired it as a result of contact with other families. However, a number of outliers are attested outside California: languages of the Northern Plains and adjoining regions of Great Lakes (Winnebago, Lakota-Dakota, Skiri Pawnee, Menominee), Southeastern Tepehuan and Oaxaca Chontal. These may result from prehistoric migrations. Presence of this polysemy in Northern Plains languages can be connected to the eastward migration of Algonquian speakers from the Proto-Algic homeland possibly located in the Fraser
River basin. The case of Southeastern Tepehuan is possibly due to prehistoric contacts between Proto-Tepiman and Yuman languages, with the subsequent southward migration of Southeastern Tepehuan speakers. Oaxaca Chontal belongs to a hypothetical Hokan family, whose other branches are located in California. Moreover, Oaxaca
Chontal word for ‘earth/year’ is cognate to words with the same meaning in Yuman and Seri.

This is my Master thesis "The Verbal system of Omaha : Forms and functions of verbal prefixes" - in French.

It includes a general presentation of the Omaha verbal system, 19 different derivational prefixes, the morphophonological processes they undergo, and their semantics.

The Proceedings of the Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference (SCLC) is an annual periodical where any presenters at the SCLC are welcome to submit papers for publication. The scope of the papers that appear here range from highly theoretical linguistics papers to papers dealing with philology, language education, and cultural topics relating to Siouan- or Caddoan-speaking peoples. The aim of the Proceedings is to be inclusive towards scholars from a variety of backgrounds and provide a venue for work that scholars, community members, and/or educators can utilize to promulgate their work relating to these two language families.

These papers are reviewed by each volume’s editor(s) and other volunteers from the Siouanist and Caddoanist communities. These volunteers are typically sought through the Siouan Linguistics Listserv. While the Listserv may have “Siouan” in the title, it is also a community for those working on Caddoan languages, given the historical overlap between scholars who worked with communities from both cultural and linguistic groups.

(Paper presented at the 9th Annual NEIU Faculty Symposium in Chicago, IL. This includes only the presentation itself.)

Affixes are commonly described in relation to which edge of a stem they adjoin to: prefixes adjoin to the leftmost edge of a stem, suffixes, adjoin to the rightmost edge of a stem, transfixes appear at both edges, etc. Languages with templatic morphology are ones where the order of affixes appears to be unmotivated (i.e., not driven by syntactic, phonological, or semantic rules). Kasak (2019) argues, however, that the order of these affixes is not completely unmotivated, as they are motivated by the morphology itself. By appealing to Anderson's (1992) notion of composite words, we can posit that there is an intermediate class of word complexity called a composite, where a single word appears within the domain of another word with additional morphological material that is not itself a word. Templatic morphology allows affixes to target multiple edges within the greater word, rather than just the most extreme leftmost or rightmost edges. As such, a morphological item like a suffix is not defined by its tendency to be found at the rightmost edge of the overall word, per se, but by its requirement to be at some right edge within a word.

This is my 2015 "mémoire de M1" (thesis for the 1st year of MA).
It presents the verbal system of a North-American Indigenous language called “Omaha” or “Omaha-Ponca”, which is severly endangered. The first part presents elements of the language family and ethnographical researches on the Omaha and Ponca tribes, what material is available and the general typology of the language. The second part focuses on the regular paradigms of the verbal system. The verbal system of Omaha has different personal morphemes for agent and patient, which are all prefixed to the radical. It also has a serie of 5 applicative prefixes which can be added to the verb and change its meaning. The core question of this work is : how is the regular paradigm affected by the addition of applicative prefixes, in morphophonological and semantic levels? For each applicative, a morphophonological description of the paradigms is given, with two person indexation tables and a template. This analysis is based on an unpublished paper by John Koontz, in which nearly all the Omaha verbal paradigms are listed and some explanations provided. Moreover, examples of sentences are given for each paradigm, from Dorsey's corpus of 1890.
At the semantic level, a lot a similarities can be found with the Lakhota applicatives “a-”, “i-”, “o-”, though in both languages there are numerous examples where the applicative signification cannot be singled out from the verb.
At a morphophonologic level, a decomposition of the changes is provided, but some uncertainties remain concerning certain changes, and various counter-examples to those rules can be found in the corpus. The paradigm with “u-” applicative is particulary complicated to understand and is worth further investigation. 

This paper lays out the conditions in which nasal harmony occurs in both languages. Hoocąk and Mandan share a common set of natural impediments to the spread of nasal harmony: supralaryngeal stops and mid vowels. Nasal harmony spreads unidirectionally until it meets one of these two blocking elements. The major distinction between these two languages is that nasal harmony is progressive in Hoocąk and regressive in Mandan.

This work investigates the presence and characteristics of vowel length in Chiwere. After cataloging over seven hundred samples of the vowels /a, e i, o, u/ in IPA transcriptions using PRAAT software, I measured the F1 and F2 frequencies and 10 duration of all vowels in the data set. With the use of this process, I hypothesize that there are a number of instances of vowel length that are morphophonemic and prosodic and support the theories of Whitman (1947), Miner (1979) and Greer (2012). In addition, this study presents new theories on the presence of vowel length such as in the presence of certain irregular verbs, the second person agent 'ra', and a 15 possible environment for phonemic vowel length. Because no spectrographic study of this kind has been done on Chiwere vowel length, this research will lay the foundation for further investigation into other Chiwere vowels and a more thorough understanding of conditions that cause vowel lengthening. 20 [

This work represents a preliminary look at the obstruent series in Hi-datsa. Various scholars have described a plain and aspirated series in Siouan (Boyle 2007, Park 2012), but there is a disagreement between scholars as to the status of "pre-aspirated" segments. Quintero (2004) notes that Siouanists have long had a debate over whether these so-called pre-aspirated stops are truly monosegmental or if they are a sequence of segments. This paper examines these previous claims and finds support for two underlying stop and affricate varieties: plain and aspirated. Furthermore, we find that there is no phonemic pre-aspiration in Hidatsa, though there is a distinction between underlying /hC/ clusters and a phonological operation of pre-aspiration of obstruents in the environment of heavy syllables bearing stress.

Lakhota is one of a few North American Indian languages that still counts the speakers of the language in the thousands. However, their age structure is alarming as there are very few speakers younger than seventeen and even the age group of today's parents usually do not speak the language. Various examples of successful language revitalization prove that it is not impossible to restart inter-generational mother-tongue transmission but they prove at the same time that it is a very difficult task. The following study analyzes the situation of Lakhota language teaching at schools, the role of schools and involvement of the community in language conservation issues. It also focuses on Lakhota opinions about standardized testing and immersion. My research was conducted on the Pine Ridge Reservation and it is based on interviews with 52 participants. It compares opinions of teachers and parents of school children with the objective to find out whether the teaching of Lakhota is adequate with respect to the current condition the language is in.

A lack of ancient written records is no impediment to establishing genetic relationships between languages at great time depths. While scholars like Sapir (1929) have proposed genetic groupings based on particular lexical similarities, other scholars have utilized amultifaceted approach to arguing for relatedness by comparing both lexical items and morphological material, given the fact that the latter is less prone to change over time than the former (Goddard 1975; Vajda 2010). This paper assesses Rankin’s (1996; 1998) earlier analysis of the plausibility of a relation from common descent between Siouan-Catawban and Yuchi, which is currently considered by most an isolate. By comparing cognates and establishing possible sound correspondences, and by examining the peculiarity of the verbal template with respect to the placement of the first person plural marker vis-à-vis the preverb and verb, and the use of nasal ablaut in Yuchi to mark future tense that is similar to iŋ-ablaut in Da...

Abstract:  Scholars have traditionally defined Jiwere (Siouan) as having 3 overtly marked persons (1, 2, 12), a 0 3rd person,  and 2 plurals, a definite =wi and an indefinite =ñe, (reserved for 3rd person) (Whitman 1948;  Marsh n.d; Hopkins 1988; Greer n.d.).  Gender is not indexed on the pronominals, There are also two cases distinguished,  Actor/Agentive, and Patient/Undergoer.  The inclusive vs. exclusive distinction and the definite vs. indefinite in particular are re-examined in light of peculiarities in the glossing of Marsh’s texts,  and discussions during recent collaboration between the author and native language expert Jimm Good Tracks on the Baxoje-Jiwere Dictionary project (NSF DEL grant 2007-2012).  The basic pronominal systems (independent, possessive, and verbal affixes) will be presented, I will argue that Jiwere has no morphologically unique  dual category in the traditional sense of the number two being separated consistently from the singular and the non-singular or plural by a single morpheme meaning precisely two persons.  However,  the semantic disjuncture between the person category (1), (2), (12), (3) makes the inclusive/exclusive persons and the competing definite /general plurals vulnerable to re-analysis by language learners as a kind of dual, because of the  pragmatic mathematical content, rather than true grammaticalization.  Such complexities in pronominals may relate to pragmatic skewing, especially vis a vis 1>2 person situations, according to Heath (1998).

Recent collegial questions about articles and demonstratives in Jiwere-Baxoje coincided with revisions of a grammar sketch (Greer) and ongoing immersion in archival materials (Campbell). The first two lines of investigation forced a re-examination of fieldnotes by Greer which resulted in the inclusion of a 'new' bit of information about the language, a definite article ge. Previous grammatical descriptions listed only an indefinite article. Subsequent correspondence with Campbell about ge resulted in his finding additional evidence from the19th century missionary Moses Merrill's Biblical translations to support this claim. This paper presents the data on ge as definite article, as well as its role in constructions such as proper nouns, and brief comparisons to articles in other Siouan languages. Finally, we consider how such a basic grammatical element could be 'hiding in plain sight' all along, and illustrate the critical value of this Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference in bringing the community of interested scholars, speakers, and teachers together to assist one another in a supportive manner.