Lakota/Dakota

Introduction

Lakota(Lakhota) is one of the four dialects of the Dakota(Dakhota) branch of the Siouan language family. The other three are Dakota, Assiniboine (Nakoda), and Stoney (Nakota). Together, the four languages are spoken by some 27,000 people in the Great Plains of north-central U.S. and southern Canada. Lakota and Dakota are so closely related that most linguists consider them dialects of the same language. Although there are some differences in pronunciation between the two, speakers can understand each other without difficulty.

Lakota is an endangered language with some 6,000 speakers. The number of native speakers is diminishing rapidly. Today, it is spoken mostly by older adults who are not passing the language on to their children. At the same time, there is cause for optimism because the population of speakers is still relatively substantial, so the tide could be turned if there were an effective revitalization program in place. Although revitalization efforts started in the 1970s, they did not succeed in producing new first-language speakers. Among the reasons for failure were absence of adequate teaching materials and not introducing language instruction in elementary schools.

Two great Lakota chiefs

Crazy Horse (Tashunca-uitco)
(1849-1877)

Crazy Horse was recognized by the Lakota people as a leader committed to preserving their traditions and way of life. He fought to prevent American encroachment on Lakota lands following the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, helping to attack a surveying party sent into the Black Hills by General George Armstrong Custer in 1873. When the War Department ordered all Lakota onto their reservations in 1876, Crazy Horse led the resistance. Leading a force of 1,200 Oglala and Cheyenne he turned back General George Crook on June 17, 1876, as Crook tried to advance toward Sitting Bull's encampment on the Little Bighorn. After this victory, Crazy Horse joined forces with Sitting Bull and on June 25 led his band in the counterattack that destroyed Custer's Seventh Cavalry. Following the Lakota victory at the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull retreated to Canada, but Crazy Horse remained to battle General Nelson Miles as he pursued the Lakota in the winter of 1876-77. The constant military harassment and the decline of the buffalo population eventually forced Crazy Horse to surrender on May 6, 1877. He remained an independent spirit to the bitter end.

Sitting Bull ( Tatanka-Iyotanka)
(1831-1890)

Sitting Bull was a Lakota chief and holy man under whom the Lakota tribes united in their struggle for survival. The war between Sitting Bull and the U.S. Army began in 1874 when an expedition led by George Armstrong Custer confirmed that gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. This area was sacred to the Lakota and placed off-limits to white settlement by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Despite this ban, prospectors rushed to the Black Hills, provoking the Lakota to defend their land. When the U.S. government failed to purchase the Black Hills, the Fort Laramie Treaty was abrogated. Custer's defeat at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876 brought more government troops who pursued the Lakota, forcing many chiefs to surrender. But Sitting Bull remained defiant. In May 1877 he led his band across the border into Canada, beyond the reach of the U.S. Army, and when General Alfred Terry offered him a pardon in exchange for settling on a reservation, Sitting Bull sent him away. Four years later, however, finding it impossible to feed his people in a world where the buffalo was almost extinct, Sitting Bull finally came south to surrender.

Structure

Sound System

Sound system

Vowels
Lakota has five oral vowels, /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/, and three nasal vowels All Lakhota oral vowels are partially devoiced in stressed and in utterance-final position. This devoicing makes it sound like the vowels are followed by an /h/.

Click here to hear the pronunciation of Lakota oral vowels.
Click here to hear the pronunciation of Lakota nasal vowels.

Consonants
Lakota has 28 consonants that include voiced/voiceless, aspirated/unaspirated, and ejective sounds. The latter are formed by a simultaneous release of two closures, one in the mouth at the position of the stop consonant, the other in the larynx at the glottis. When the compressed air resulting from the double closure is released, there is an audible crack.

Consonants and vowels usually alternate in Lakota words. Clusters do not exceed two consonants and usually occur at the beginning of words. Most words end in a vowel, e.g., /la-kxo'-ta/ "Indian."

Stress
The first (or only) stressed vowel in Lakota words has a higher pitch and greater loudness than all other vowels in that word. Stress usually falls on the second vowel in the word, but not always. It is always indicated in writing.

Click here to listen to a story "Man Rescued by the Eagles" read by a speaker of Lakota.
You can hear some Lakota spoken in the film "Dances with Wolves."

Grammar

Grammar
Lakota is a polysynthetic language in which words are formed by adding affixes to stems to signal grammatical relations.

Noun phrase
Nouns can be formed through compounding with the result that a noun is more like a clause than a single word such as in English and in European languages, e.g., wama'khas^kaNs^kaN means "animals" (literally, "those moving about on the earth"). The grammatical roles of subject, object, or indirect object are indicated by verbal affixes rather than by noun cases, as in European languages.

Verb phrase
Every Lakota verb carries affixes that refer to participants, i.e., the subject, direct object, or indirect object. 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). Lakota forms 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."

Word order
Word order in Lakota is Subject-Object-Verb.

Vocabulary

Lakota tends not to borrow words from other languages. Instead, It uses its own linguistic resources to create new words, e.g., "airplane" is kiNye'khiyapi, literally, "they make them fly (in them)"; "whiskey" is mni'wakhaN, (literally "wonderful water.")

To give you an idea of Lakota vocabulary, take a look at some kinship terms below.

ina' ina'waye kiN	address form for "mother" "the one I have for mother"
ate' ate'waye kiN	address form for "father" "the one I have for father"
wic^hiN'c^ala	"girl"
hoks^i'la	"boy"
thaNke' c^huwe' thaNks^i' thaNka'	"older sister of a man" "older sister of a woman" "younger sister of a man" "younger sister of a woman"
c^hiye' thiblo' suNka'la	"older brother of a man" "older sister of a woman" "younger sister of a man of a woman"

Writing

Lakota was first recorded in written form by missionaries around 1840. Several orthographies are used today to write the language. Attempts at standardizing the orthography have been unsuccessful thus far.

Click here to see the different orthographies and to listen to the sounds represented by the symbols.

Take a look at the text of Genesis 1.1 in Dakota.

What does the word Wicole mean?
What does the word Wakantanka mean?

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear withness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

Click here to see lists of common words and phrases in Lakota.

Lakota words in English
Did you know that the word tepee comes from Dakota tipi "dwelling?"

Resources

Dakota Language Learning Resources
Dakota Language Lessons on the Web
Dakota and Lakota Language Resources
Online Textbook of Lakhota
Sketch of Lakhota
UCLA Language Leaning Materials Listing for Lakota
Houghton Mifflin Encyclopedia of North American Indians - Lakota
Native American Languages
Native Web
Dakota and Lakota Sioux Language Resources
Yamada Language Center Guide for Dakota
Yamada Language Center guide for Lakota
UCLA Language Materials Project - Lakota Profile
Lakota and Dakota Language Resources
UCLA language Materials Project Lakota Links
Lakota Lessons
Omniglot - Dakota