Caddoan Language Family

Culture area: Plains

Tribes affected: Arikara, Pawnee, Wichita

The original geographical area in which Caddoan languages were spoken spanned what eventually became Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and parts of East Texas. By the twentieth century, the Caddoan group had become quite limited, both in the number of languages still traceable and the number of remaining speakers of each. Today, three key Caddoan languages survive: Caddo proper, Pawnee, and Wichita. Some experts extend the list to include Arikara (or Ree), a nearly distinct tongue originally related dialectically to Pawnee. Use of the term Caddoan as a general classification came after the research into Indian language groups undertaken by John Powell in the 1890’s. Before then, the term Pawnee was applied to both Caddo and Wichita, as well as to Pawnee itself. Historically, the ancestors of today’s Caddoan speakers referred to themselves as Hasinai, a name apparently applicable to tribes in the East Texas area, or Kadohadacho, a more general grouping covering the area from East Texas eastward and northeastward.

Linguists assume that when European explorers first recorded their observation of Caddoan speakers—possibly as early as 1541 with Hernando de Soto and his expedition, and certainly by 1687 with Sieur de La Salle and his expedition—several other languages existed that have now disappeared.

Several features link the four surviving languages linguistically. Although all share certain phonetic or grammatical family traits, it is important to note that they are distinct enough to be mutually unintelligible.

The main sound system, or phonology, of the Caddoan languages is based on only three vowels (i, u, and a) and about twenty consonants. Among the latter are voiced and unvoiced consonants, glottalized stops, two sibilants, and four affricates (sounds produced by stopping all breath flow, then releasing at the moment of articulation, as in the “tch” combination in the English word “clutch”).

A common grammatical pattern in Caddoan languages is absorption into the verb of elements that—without being semantically linked to the verb—lend their meaning to the action which the verb denotes. A typical case would be the prefixes awis-, anikis-, and ini- (approximate phonetic renderings), which indicate that certain verbal conditions (for example, “to be something,” as in the expression “to be angry”) occur “while sitting,” “while standing,” or “while lying.” Other prefixes that can affect the way a conjugated verb is understood include tak- and tuk-, which imply possibility or probability (as in “I might see,” contrasted with “I probably will see”). A different prefix would be attached to obtain the same nuance, but in negative form (as in “I am not likely to see”).

The earliest attempts to collect samples of Caddoan vocabulary came only after the United States’ acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1801. John Sibley provided President Thomas Jefferson (himself a collector of a wide variety of cultural and linguistic “memorabilia”) with a small body of words and their definitions. The tongue he transcribed as a branch of Caddo was, he said, called Natchitoches. Later evidence suggested that Sibley’s word list was not actually Caddoan, but Adai, with some Caddoan borrowings.

A second early vocabulary list, this time indisputably Pawnee with some samplings of the Arikara dialect, was collected by a German traveler to what was considered the western United States in the 1830’s. Alexander Philipp Maximilian, Prinz von Weid, depended on a non-Indian who spoke Pawnee to provide him with terms that were mainly practical in nature. A near-contemporary American traveler in 1836, Albert Gallatin, was aware that the Arikara (located quite far north, in what became North and South Dakota) spoke a language that was close to Pawnee, but he remained convinced that none of their vocabulary had been collected for comparison. This is precisely what von Weid was doing. Publication of his work three years later made it linguistically possible to prove that Arikara had, in fact, branched off from the main Pawnee groups and migrated north.

Incomplete collections of Caddoan terms, without any accompanying efforts at linguistic analysis, were provided by a number of military and ethnographic observers by mid-century. Two individuals in particular, Randolph B. Marcy (author of the 1853 Exploration of the Red River of Louisiana) and Amiel Weeks Whipple (author of the 1856 Reports of Explorations . . . for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean), worked to collect Wichita vocabulary. Whipple’s work took on added significance after a few generations’ time, since he worked among speakers of Waco, a Wichita dialect that subsequently became extinct.

Unfortunately, the only substantial studies involving systematic phonemic analysis (for accurate pronunciation of words that never appeared in writing) would not be realized until the second half of the twentieth century, when the number of Caddoan speakers had dwindled seriously.