Caddoan languages
Encyclopedia
The Caddoan languages are a family
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

 of Native American languages. They are spoken by Native Americans in parts of the Great Plains
Great Plains
The Great Plains are a broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe and grassland, which lies west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S...

 of the central United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, from North Dakota
North Dakota
North Dakota is a state located in the Midwestern region of the United States of America, along the Canadian border. The state is bordered by Canada to the north, Minnesota to the east, South Dakota to the south and Montana to the west. North Dakota is the 19th-largest state by area in the U.S....

 south to Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...

.

Family division

Five languages belong to the Caddoan language family:
  • Caddo
    Caddo language
    Caddo is the only surviving Southern Caddoan language of the Caddo language family. It is spoken by the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. Today, only 25 elderly speakers are estimated to remain, none of whom are monolingual Caddo speakers, making Caddo a critically endangered language...

    (dialects: Kadohadacho, Hasinai
    Hasinai
    The Hasinai Confederacy was a large confederation of Caddo-speaking Native Americans located between the Sabine and Trinity rivers in eastern Texas...

    , Natchitoches, Yatasi
    Yatasi
    The Yatasi are a Native American people from northwestern Louisiana that are part of the Natchitoches Confederacy of the Caddo Nation...

    )
  • Northern Caddoan
    • Wichita
      Wichita language
      Wichita is a moribund Caddoan language spoken in Oklahoma by the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. Only one fluent speaker remains, Doris McLemore, although in 2007 there were only three first language learners still alive...

       (dialects: Wichita proper, Waco, Tawakoni)
    • Pawnee–Kitsai
      • Kitsai
        Kitsai language
        The Kitsai language is an extinct member of the Caddoan language family. It was spoken in Oklahoma by the Kichai tribe and became extinct in the 1930s. It is thought to be related to Wichita but more closely to Pawnee...

         (also known as Kichai) (†)
      • Pawnee
        • Arikara
          Arikara language
          Arikara is a Caddoan language spoken by the Arikara people, who reside primarily at Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota. Arikara is very close to the Pawnee language, but they are not mutually intelligible....

          (also known as Ree)
        • Pawnee
          Pawnee language
          The Pawnee language is a Caddoan language spoken by some Pawnee Native Americans now located in north central Oklahoma. Their traditional historic lands were along the Platte River in what is now Nebraska. Once the language of thousands of Pawnees, today Pawnee is spoken by a shrinking number of...

          (dialects: South Bend, Skiri (also known as Skidi or Wolf))


The Kitsai language is now extinct
Extinct language
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers., or that is no longer in current use. Extinct languages are sometimes contrasted with dead languages, which are still known and used in special contexts in written form, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication...

, as its members were absorbed in the 19th century into the Wichita
Wichita (tribe)
The Wichita people are indigenous inhabitants of North America, who traditionally spoke the Wichita language, a Caddoan language. They have lived in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas...

 tribe. All of the other Caddoan languages are critically endangered; Caddo
Caddo language
Caddo is the only surviving Southern Caddoan language of the Caddo language family. It is spoken by the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. Today, only 25 elderly speakers are estimated to remain, none of whom are monolingual Caddo speakers, making Caddo a critically endangered language...

 is now spoken by only 25 people, Pawnee
Pawnee language
The Pawnee language is a Caddoan language spoken by some Pawnee Native Americans now located in north central Oklahoma. Their traditional historic lands were along the Platte River in what is now Nebraska. Once the language of thousands of Pawnees, today Pawnee is spoken by a shrinking number of...

 by 20, Arikara
Arikara language
Arikara is a Caddoan language spoken by the Arikara people, who reside primarily at Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota. Arikara is very close to the Pawnee language, but they are not mutually intelligible....

 by three, and Wichita
Wichita language
Wichita is a moribund Caddoan language spoken in Oklahoma by the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. Only one fluent speaker remains, Doris McLemore, although in 2007 there were only three first language learners still alive...

 by just one tribal elder, Doris McLemore
Doris McLemore
Doris Jean Lamar McLemore is the last fluent speaker of the Wichita language, a Caddoan language spoken by the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, indigenous to Oklahoma....

. Caddo, Wichita, and Pawnee are spoken in Oklahoma by small numbers of tribal elders. Arikara is spoken on the Fort Berthold Reservation
Fort Berthold Reservation
The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation is a U.S. Indian reservation in western North Dakota that is home for the federally recognized Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes...

 in North Dakota
North Dakota
North Dakota is a state located in the Midwestern region of the United States of America, along the Canadian border. The state is bordered by Canada to the north, Minnesota to the east, South Dakota to the south and Montana to the west. North Dakota is the 19th-largest state by area in the U.S....

.

Speakers of some of the languages were formerly more widespread; the Caddo
Caddo
The Caddo Nation is a confederacy of several Southeastern Native American tribes, who traditionally inhabited much of what is now East Texas, northern Louisiana and portions of southern Arkansas and Oklahoma. Today the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma is a cohesive tribe with its capital at Binger, Oklahoma...

, for example, used to live in northeastern Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...

, southwestern Arkansas
Arkansas
Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...

, and northwestern Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...

, as well as southeastern Oklahoma. The Pawnee formerly lived along the Platte River
Platte River
The Platte River is a major river in the state of Nebraska and is about long. Measured to its farthest source via its tributary the North Platte River, it flows for over . The Platte River is a tributary of the Missouri River, which in turn is a tributary of the Mississippi River which flows to...

 in what is now Nebraska
Nebraska
Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. The state's capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River....

.

Pre-history of Caddoan

Glottochronology
Glottochronology
Glottochronology is that part of lexicostatistics dealing with the chronological relationship between languages....

 is a controversial method of reconstructing in broad detail the history of a language and its relationships. In the case of proto-Caddoan it appears that it divided into two branches, Northern and Southern, more than 3,000 years ago. (The division of the language implies also a geographic and/or political separation.) South Caddoan or Caddo proper evolved in north-eastern Texas and adjacent Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. No daughter languages are known, although some probably existed in the 16th and 17th century but were not recorded.

Northern Caddoan evolved into several different languages. The language that became Wichita (with several different dialects) branched off about 2,000 years ago. Kitsai separated from the Northern Caddoan stem about 12 centuries ago and Pawnee and Arikara separated 300 to 500 years ago.

External relations

Adai, a language isolate
Language isolate
A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...

 known only from a 275-word list collected in 1804, may be a Caddoan language. The documentation is too scanty to determine with certainty. The Adai lived in Louisiana. The language of the Ais, who lived adjacent to the Caddo, was a distinct language, but was probably related to Caddoan. (Another unrelated people also called the Ais lived in Florida.)
Some linguists believe that the Caddoan and Iroquoian languages
Iroquoian languages
The Iroquoian languages are a First Nation and Native American language family.-Family division:*Ruttenber, Edward Manning. 1992 [1872]. History of the Indian tribes of Hudson's River. Hope Farm Press....

 may be connected in a Macro-Siouan
Macro-Siouan languages
The Macro-Siouan languages are a proposed language family that would include the Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan families. Most linguists remain unconvinced that these languages share a genetic relationship, and the existence of a Macro-Siouan language family remains a subject of debate.In the 19th...

 language family, but work is suggestive and the theory remains hypothetical. Similar attempts to find a connection with the Algonquian languages
Algonquian languages
The Algonquian languages also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Native American languages which includes most of the languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically similar Algonquin dialect of the Ojibwe language, which is a...

 has been partially useful. There is insufficient evidence for linguists to propose a hypothetical Macro-Algonquian/Iroquoian language family.

External links

Indiana University-Bloomington American Indian Studies Research Institute's Northern Caddoan Linguistic Text Corpora site: http://zia.aisri.indiana.edu/~corpora/ and Dictionary Database Search (includes Arikara, Skiri Pawnee, South Band Pawnee, Assiniboine
Assiniboine language
The Assiniboine language is a Nakotan Siouan language of the Northern Plains, spoken by around 200 Assiniboine people, most of them elderly. The name Asiniibwaan is an Ojibwe term meaning "Stone Siouans"...

 [Nakoda], and Yanktonai Sioux [Dakota]):http://zia.aisri.indiana.edu/~dictsearch/

Further reading

  • Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
  • Chafe, Wallace L. (1973). Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan. In T. Sebeok (Ed.), Current trends in linguistics (Vol. 10, pp. 1164–1209). The Hague: Mouton. (Reprinted as Chafe 1976).
  • Chafe, Wallace L. (1976). Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan. In T. Sebeok (Ed.), Native languages in the Americas (pp. 527–572). New York: Plenum. (Originally published as Chafe 1973).
  • Chafe, Wallace L. (1976). The Caddoan, Iroquioan, and Siouan languages. Trends in linguistics; State-of-the-art report (No. 3). The Hague: Mouton. ISBN 90-279-3443-6.
  • Chafe, Wallace L. (1979). Caddoan. In L. Campbell & M. Mithun (Eds.), The languages of Native America: Historical and comparative assessment (pp. 213–235). Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-74624-5.
  • Chafe, Wallace L. (1993). Indian languages: Siouan–Caddoan. Encyclopedia of the North American colonies (Vol. 3). New York: C. Scribner's Sons ISBN 0-684-19611-5.
  • Lesser, Alexander; & Weltfish, Gene. (1932). Composition of the Caddoan linguistic stock. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 87 (6), 1-15.
  • Melnar, Lynette R. Caddo Verb Morphology(2004) University of Nebraska Press, ISBN 978-0-8032-2088-1
  • Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
  • Taylor, Allan. (1963). Comparative Caddoan. International Journal of American Linguistics, 29, 113-131.
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