Siouan Language Family

Introduction

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 that refers to Siouan people.

Buffalo

Below is a list of surviving Siouan languages and their current status.

Dakota	20,600	Dakota and Lakota are spoken in the Great Plains of north-central U.S. and southern Canada. They are so closely related that most linguists consider them dialects of the same language. There are some differences in pronunciation, but speakers can usually understand each other.
Lakota	6,000
Stoney (Nakoda)	1,000-1,500	Stoney and Assiniboine are spoken in Montana, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. They are closely related, but people speaking them cannot understand each other well, so despite their similarities, most linguists consider them separate languages.
Assiniboine (Nakota)
Crow (Apsaaloke)	4,000	Crow is spoken in Montana. 77% of Crow people over 66 years old speak the language; no preschoolers do. 80% prefer to use English (1998). Spoken by some parents and older adults (1998). Crow is close to Hidatsa.
Hidatsa	severely endangered	Only a few elders speak Hidatsa today in North Dakota, but some young people are trying to learn their ancestral language again.
Mandan	probably extinct	Only a few elders speak Mandan today, but some young people are trying to learn their ancestral language again.
Omaha-Ponca	severely endangered	Omaha-Ponca is spoken today by about 100 people in Nebraska and Oklahoma. Most speakers are elders, but some young people are working to keep their ancestral language alive.
Osage (Wazhazhe)	probably extinct	Only a handful of elders in Oklahoma still speak the Osage language today, but some young people are trying to learn their native language.
Ho-Chunk (Winnebago)	230	Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) is spoken in Wisconsin and Nebraska. It had been in decline, but a very vigorous Ho-Chunk revival program has been helping young people to learn their ancestral language.
Chiwere (Iowa-Oto)	probably extinct	Chiwere is spoken in Oklahoma, Iowa, and Kansas. It has three dialects, spoken by the Iowa, Oto, and Missouria tribes, but only the Iowa dialect has native speakers still living today.

Structure

Sound System

Vowels
Siouan languages usually have five oral /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, and three nasal vowels.

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

Grammar

Sioux woman

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).

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 ("tree juice").

Below are the number 1-5 and several common words in 10 Siouan languages.

Can you see any similarities/differences across these languages?
Are any of the languages closer to each other than to others?


one
two
three
four
five
man
woman
sun
moon
water

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.

Click here to listen to the sounds of the Lakota language and to see the different ways in which these sounds are represented in various orthographies.

The printed literature of the Sioux includes religious works, school textbooks, grammars, and dictionaries, and miscellaneous publications.

Siouan words in English
Three states have names that come 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

Resources

Siouan language study resources
Siouan Language Family
Siouan Languages
Native American Sites
University of Montana Hokan-Siouan Language Family Page
Houghton Mifflin Encyclopedia of North American Indians - Sioux
Wikipedia - Siouan Languages

Click here to learn more about Lakota/Dakota on this website.