Siouan Language Family

Culture areas: Plains, Southeast

Tribes affected: Assiniboine, Biloxi, Catawba, Crow, Hidatsa, Iowa, Kansa, Mandan, Missouri, Ofo, Omaha, Osage, Oto, Ponca, Quapaw, Sioux, Tutelo, Winnebago

The tribes speaking Siouan languages once occupied areas as far north as Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba in Canada and lived in the United States as far south as Mississippi and Louisiana and, in isolated groups, as far east as the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia and the Carolinas. The arrival of European settlers and subsequent displacement of coastal Indians, however, led to intertribal wars that eliminated the Sioux in the Carolinas and pushed others relentlessly west. Since the nineteenth century, Sioux tribes have lived predominantly in the Great Plains and Mississippi and Missouri river valleys.

About one-third of all prehistoric Siouan languages died unrecorded except for their names; others, especially those in the Southeast cultural area, left few records before disappearing. The survival of the rest is in doubt. Even the largest of the known Siouan languages has had steadily shrinking numbers of speakers. The 1970 census reported that about twenty thousand people spoke Siouan languages in South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, and Minnesota; the 1980 census found nearly sixteen thousand, the majority of whom were elderly; a 1986 survey placed the number at fewer than fourteen thousand.

Member Languages

Proto-Siouan began splitting into branches about three thousand years ago, and perhaps earlier if Catawba (a language once spoken in South Carolina) is included in the family. Siouan proper comprises four branches: Missouri River, Mandan (a language that constitutes a branch of its own), Mississippi Valley, and Southeastern. The Southeastern branch includes Tutelo, Biloxi, and Ofo, all extinct, although an Ofo speaker was alive as recently as 1908. The Mississippi Valley branch is the largest, both in the number of languages and surviving speakers: Dakota, with its dialects Santee, Teton (Lakota), Yankton, and Assiniboine (Stoney); Dhegihan, including the languages Omaha-Poncan, Kansa-Osage, and Quapaw; Chiwere, including the languages Iowa, Otoe, and Missouri; and Winnebago (Hochangara). The Missouri River branch consists of Crow and Hidatsa.

Linguists have partially reconstructed Proto-Siouan using cognates, shared sound structures, and shared grammatical features; its affiliation to other families is probable but not proved. In Language in the Americas (1987), Joseph H. Greenberg places the Siouan languages, together with Yuchi, in “Keresiouan” (containing the Caddoan language family and Iroquoian langauge family as well), a grouping of families accepted by some scholars. Greenberg goes further, however: He assigns Keresiouan, along with Almosan, to Northern Amerind, one of the six large families of Amerind, a language phylum that includes most of the languages in North America and all those in Central and South America. This phylum, conceived by Joseph H. Greenberg, is controversial.

Language Characteristics

Proto-Siouan was a polysynthetic, or incorporative, language. Like nearly all American Indian languages, it combined major sentence elements into single words. Its offspring languages retain this characteristic, although not as thoroughly as other Indian languages, and similarities in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar are still fairly common within branches, especially in the Mississippi River branch. In fact, in Grammar and Dictionary of the Language of the Hidatsa (1873), Washington Matthews claimed that Native Americans who spoke as many as five Siouan languages were common.

Proto-Siouan appears to have had fifteen consonants, five vowels, and three nasalized vowels. Some consonants could form clusters of two, and a distinction existed between aspirated (pronunciation accompanied by a rasp of breath) and unaspirated versions of the same consonant sound. Among surviving languages, Crow and Hidatsa have lost nasalization, and most languages have simplified the consonant clusters; Crow, Hidatsa, and the Southeastern languages have added vowels to the beginning of some syllables; and Dakota, among others, has developed voiced versions of unvoiced consonants. Consequently, the sound systems of offspring languages are more extensive than was that of Proto-Siouan. Lakota, for example, has twenty-nine consonants and Dakota twenty-three.

Vocabulary is based on roots, compounds, and combinations of roots and affixes, much as in English except that Siouan languages use affixes more extensively to turn verbs and adjectives into nouns or to indicate instrumentality in verbs. Compounds are usually descriptive and self-explanatory. For examples, the Dakota word for a steamship is watapeta, literally “fire boat,” and the word for train is hemani, literally “walks on land.” Siouan tongues also possess rich and diverse vocabularies for family relationships, reflecting tribal organizations based on the extended family.

The verb is the most complex unit of Siouan grammar. Prefixes, infixes, and suffixes are added to the verb to show plurality, aspect (duration and completeness), the object of the verb (if it is a pronoun), and instrumentality (how an action is performed). Auxiliary words indicate negation and whether the verb expresses emphasis, a statement, or a question. Nouns do not change form from the singular to the plural or for different grammatical functions, such as subject and object. Prefixes or separate pronouns signal possession, although the possessive pronoun may be incorporated into the verb. Subject and object pronouns usually merge with the verb, except that the third-person singular subject pronoun is never expressed. Yet another set of personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, interrogative pronouns, and relative pronouns are separated from the verb. Besides singular and plural pronouns, some Siouan languages have dual pronouns for referring to a speaker and the person being addressed.

Siouan word order in sentences follows a basic subject-object-verb pattern, which need not vary from statements to questions. Time expressions come first in a sentence. Adjectives, articles, and prepositions follow the nouns to which they refer. Linking verbs generally are omitted. Men and women may use different forms to express commands.

Bibliography

Chafe, Wallace L. The Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan Languages. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.

Greenberg, Joseph H. Language in the Americas. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Karol, Joseph S., and Stephen L. Rozman, eds. Everyday Lakota: An English-Sioux Dictionary for Beginners. Rev. ed. St. Francis, S.Dak.: Rosebud Educational Society, 1974.

Matthews, Washington. Grammar and Dictionary of the Language of the Hidatsa. New York: Cramoisy Press, 1873-1874. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1983.

Rood, David S. “Siouan.” In The Languages of Native America: Historical and Comparative Assessment, edited by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.

Wolff, Hans. “Comparative Siouan.” International Journal of American Linguistics 16 (1950): 61ff; 17 (1951): 197-204.

Working Indians Civil Association. An English-Dakota Dictionary. Fort Pierre, S.Dak.: Author, 1969.