Lakota language

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Lakota language

Lakota (also Lakhota, Teton, Teton Sioux) is one of the three languages of the Sioux

Sioux

Sioux are a Native Americans in the United States and First Nations people. The term can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or any of the nation's many dialects....
, of the Siouan

Siouan languages

The Siouan languages are a Indigenous peoples of the Americas language family of North America, and the second largest indigenous language family in North America, after Algonquian....
family. While generally taught and considered by speakers as a separate language, Lakota is mutually understandable with the other two languages, and is considered by most linguists one of the three major varieties

Variety (linguistics)

In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called a lect, is a language or dialect considered as a variety or development of another language or dialect....
of the Sioux language

Sioux language

Sioux is a Siouan language spoken by over 26,000 Sioux, making it the fifth most spoken Indigenous languages of the Americas in North America , behind Navajo language, Cree language, Inuit language and Anishinaabe language....
. The Lakota language represents one of the largest Native American language speech communities left in the United States, with approximately 6,000 speakers living mostly in northern plains states of North

North Dakota

North Dakota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States and Western United States regions of the United States of America. North Dakota is the 19th largest state by area in the US; it is the 48th most populous, with just over 640,000 residents as of 2006....
and South Dakota

South Dakota

South Dakota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States of the United States of America. It is named after the Lakota people and Sioux Sioux Native Americans in the United States tribes....
.

The language was first put into written form by missionaries around 1840 and has since evolved to reflect contemporary needs and usage.

ta has five oral vowels, , and three nasal vowels, (phonetically ).

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Vowels

Lakota has five oral vowels, , and three nasal vowels, (phonetically ). Lakota and are said to be more open

Open-mid vowel

The open-mid vowels make a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel....
than the corresponding cardinal vowels, perhaps closer to and . Orthographically, the nasal vowels are sometimes written with a following , , or , and sometimes with ogonek

Ogonek

The ogonek is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European and Native American languages....
s underneath, .

Consonants

Bilabial
Bilabial consonant

In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...
Dental
Dental consonant

In linguistics, a dental consonant or dental is a consonant that is articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as , , , and in some languages....
Alveolar
Alveolar consonant

Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the Dental alveolus of the superior teeth....
Palatal
Palatal consonant

Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate . Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex consonant....
Velar
Velar consonant

Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the Soft palate)....
Uvular
Uvular consonant

Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the Palatine uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants....
Glottal
Glottal consonant

Glottal consonants are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricatives, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider them to be consonants at all....
Nasal
Nasal consonant

A nasal consonant is produced with a lowered soft palate in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue....

Plosive unaspirated
voiced
aspirated
Aspiration (phonetics)

In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of Earth's atmosphere that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents....

ejective
Ejective consonant

In phonetics, ejective consonants are voiceless consonants that are pronounced with simultaneous closure of the glottis. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspiration or tenuis consonants....

Fricative voiceless
voiced
ejective
Ejective consonant

In phonetics, ejective consonants are voiceless consonants that are pronounced with simultaneous closure of the glottis. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspiration or tenuis consonants....

Approximant
Approximant consonant

Approximants are speech sounds that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and "typical" consonants. In the articulation of approximants, articulatory organs produce a narrowing of the vocal tract, but leave enough space for air to flow without much audible turbulence....

The voiced plosives and should perhaps be considered allophones of and , since for almost all words they are in complementary distribution, with and occurring only before , , , , and , as well as in certain morphophonemic situations. The voiced uvular fricative becomes a uvular trill before /i/. The voiceless aspirated plosives have two allophonic variants each: those with a delay in voicing , and those with velar friction , which occur before , , , , and (thus, lakhóta, is phonetically ; does not occur). For some speakers, there is a phonemic distinction between the two, and both occur before . Some orthographies mark this distinction; others do not. The uvular fricatives and are commonly spelled (sometimes ) and .

The spelling used in modern texts is often written without diacritics, resulting in the failure to mark stress and the confusion of numerous consonants: and are both written s, and are both written h, and the aspirate stops are written like the unaspirates, as p, t, c, k.

All monomorphemic
Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantics Meaning .In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes ....
words have one vowel which carries primary stress
Stress (linguistics)

In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables....
and has a higher tone than all other vowels in the word. This is generally the vowel of the second syllable of the word, but often the first syllable can be stressed, and occasionally other syllables as well. Stress is generally indicated with an acute accent: <á>, etc. Compound words will have stressed vowels in each component; proper spelling will write compounds with a hyphen. Thus máza-ská, literally "metal-white", i.e. "silver, money" has two stressed vowels, the first a in each component. If it were written without the hyphen, as maza ska, it could only have one stress.

Phonological processes

A common phonological process which occurs in rapid speech is vowel contraction, which generally results from the loss of an intervocalic glide. Vowel contraction results in phonetic long vowels (phonemically
Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
a sequence of two identical vowels), with falling pitch if the first underlying vowel is stressed, and rising pitch if the second underlying vowel is stressed: kê: (falling tone), "he said that," from kéye; ha:pi (rising tone), "clothing," from hayápi. If one of the vowels is nasalized, the resulting long vowel is also nasalized: cha?:pi, "sugar," from chaha´pi.

When two vowels of unequal height contract, or when feature contrasts exist between the vowels and the glide, two new phonetic vowels, and , result: iyæ^:, "he left for there," from iyáye; mit?^:, "it's mine," from mitáwa.

The plural enclitic
Clitic

In linguistics, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonology dependent word. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level....
=pi is frequently changed in rapid speech when preceding the enclitics =kte, =ki, =kštó, or =na. If the vowel preceding =pi is high, =pi becomes [u]; if the vowel is non-high, =pi becomes [o] (if the preceding vowel is nasalized, then the resulting vowel is also nasalized): hí=pi=kte, "they will arrive here," [hiukte]; yatka´=pi=na, "they drank it and...," .

Lakota also exhibits some traces of sound symbolism among fricatives, where the point of articulation changes to reflect intensity: zí, "it's yellow," ží, "it's tawny," , "it's brown" (Mithun 1999:33). (Compare with the similar examples in Mandan
Mandan language

Mandan is an endangered language Siouan languages language....
.)

Grammar

Word order

The basic word order of Lakota is Subject Object Verb
Subject Object Verb

In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb is the type of languages in which the subject , object , and verb of a sentence appear or usually appear in that order....
, although the order can be changed for expressive purposes (placing the object before the subject to bring the object into focus or placing the subject after the verb to emphasize its status as established information). It is postpositional
Adposition

In grammar, a preposition is a part of speech that introduces a adpositional phrase. For example, in the sentence "The cat sleeps on the sofa", the word "on" is a preposition, introducing the prepositional phrase "on the sofa"....
, with adpositions occurring after the head nouns: mas'óphiye él, "at the store" (literally 'store at'); thípi=ki ókša, "around the house" (literally 'house=the around') (Rood and Taylor 1996).

Rood and Taylor (1996) suggest the following template for basic word order. Items in parenthesis are optional; only the verb is required. It is therefore possible to produce a grammatical sentence that contains only a verb.
(interjection) (conjunction) (adverb(s)) (nominal) (nominal) (nominal) (adverb(s)) verb (enclitic(s)) (conjunction)

Interjections

When interjections
Interjection

An interjection is a part of speech that usually has no grammatical connection with the rest of the Sentence and simply expresses emotion on the part of the speaker, although most interjections have clear definitions....
appear, they begin the sentence. Buechel (1983) suggests that the interjection ma is used by women, while men use wa or hoh? (see also Men's and women's speech below).

Conjunctions

It is common for a sentence to begin with a conjunction. Both chake and yukha can be translated as and; k?eyas is similar to English but. Each of these conjunctions joins clauses. In addition, the conjunction na joins nouns or phrases.

Adverbs and Postpositions

Lakota uses postpositions, which are similar to English prepositions, but follow their noun complement. Adverbs
Adverb

An adverb is a part of speech. It is any word that modifies any other part of language: verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentence s and other adverbs, except for nouns; modifiers of nouns are primarily determiners and adjectives....
or postpositional phrases can describe manner, location, or reason. There are also interrogative
Interrogative word

In linguistics, an interrogative word is a function word used for the item interrupted in an information statement. Interrogative words are sometimes also called wh-words because most of Idiots language interrogative words start with wh-....
adverbs, which are used to form questions.

Nouns and Pronouns

As mentioned above, nominals
Noun phrase

In grammar, a noun phrase is a phrase whose Head is a noun or a pronoun, optionally accompanied by a set of modifiers.Noun phrases are very common linguistic typology, but some languages like Tuscarora language and Cayuga language have been argued to lack this category....
are optional in Lakota, but when nouns appear the basic word order is Subject-Object-Verb. Pronouns are not common, but may be used contrastively
Contrast (linguistics)

In linguistics and semantics contrast is a relationship between two discourse segments. Contrast is often overtly marked by contrastive markers like but or however, such as in the following examples:...
or emphatically.

Lakota has four articles
Article (grammar)

An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the types of reference being made by the noun, and to specify the volume or numerical scope of that reference....
: wa is indefinite, similar to English a or an, and ki is definite, similar to English the. In addition, wazi is an indefinite article used with hypothetical or irrealis objects, and k?u is a definite article used with nouns that have been mentioned previously.

There are also five demonstratives
Demonstrative

Demonstratives are deictic expression words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguishes those entities from others. Demonstratives are employed for spatial deixis and as discourse deictics, referring to propositions mentioned in speech....
, which can function either as pronouns or as determiners
Determiner (class)

A determiner is a noun modifier that expresses the reference of a noun or noun phrase, including quantity, rather than its attributes as expressed by adjectives....
. The demonstratives are lé (this), hé (that) hena (those), henáos (those two) and é. This last, é, is less specific, and is usually translated as this.

Verbs

Verbs are the only word class that are obligatory in a Lakota sentence. Verbs can be active, naming an action, or stative
Stative verb

A stative verb is one which asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property . Statives differ from other Grammatical aspect classes of verbs in that they are static; they have no duration and no distinguished endpoint....
, describing a property. (Note that in English, such descriptions are usually made with adjectives
Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntax role is to grammatical modifier a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or pronoun's definition....
.)

Verbs are inflected
Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as grammatical tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, grammatical person, grammatical number, grammatical gender, grammatical case....
for first-, second- or third person
Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deixis reference to a participant in an event, such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns....
, and for singular, dual
Dual (grammatical number)

Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities identified by the noun or pronoun....
or plural grammatical number
Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
.

Morphology

Verb Inflection

There are two paradigms for verb inflection
Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as grammatical tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, grammatical person, grammatical number, grammatical gender, grammatical case....
. One set of morphemes
Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantics Meaning .In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes ....
indicates the person
Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deixis reference to a participant in an event, such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns....
and number
Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
of the subject
Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
of active verbs. The other set of morphemes agrees
Agreement (linguistics)

In languages, agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when one word changes in form depending on to which other words it is being related....
with the object
Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence Predicate . It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb....
of transitive
Transitive verb

In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more object s....
action verbs or the subject of stative verbs.

Most of the morphemes in each paradigm are prefixes, but plural subjects are marked with a suffix and plural objects with an infix
Infix

An infix is an affix inserted inside a stem . It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix....
.

First person arguments may be singular, dual
Dual (grammatical number)

Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities identified by the noun or pronoun....
, or plural; second or third person arguments may be singular or plural.

Subject of active verbs

Examples: ya "He goes." yápi "They go."

Object or subject of stative verbs

Example: wawíchayaka "He looked at them."

Enclitics

Lakota has a number of enclitic particles
Grammatical particle

A particle, in grammar, is a function word that is not assignable to any of the traditional grammatical word classes . The term is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of elements and lacks a precise universal definition....
which follow the verb, many of which differ depending on whether the speaker is male or female.

Some enclitics indicate the aspect, mood, or number of the verb they follow. There are also various interrogative enclitics, which in addition to marking an utterance as a question show finer distinctions of meaning. For example, while he is the usual question-marking enclitic, huwó is used for rhetorical questions
Rhetorical question

A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to reflect on what the implied answer to the question must be....
or in formal oratory
Oratory

Oratory is a type of public speaking.Oratory may also refer to:* Oratory , a power metal band* Oratory , a place of worship* a religious order such as...
, and the dubitative
Dubitative mood

Dubitative mood is a grammatical mood found in some languages, that indicates that the statement is dubious, doubtful, or uncertain.An example can be taken from Ojibwe language, an Algonquian languages of North America....
wa functions somewhat like a tag question
Tag question

A Tag question is a grammar structure in which a Sentence #Classification by purpose statement or an imperative mood is turned into a question by adding an interrogative fragment ....
in English (Rood and Taylor 1996; Buchel 1983). (See also Men and women's speech below.)

Men and women's speech

There are a number of enclitics which differ in form based on the gender of the speaker. Yeló (men) marks mild assertions, and kšt (men) marks stronger assertions. K(i)štó is the version used by women corresponding to men's yeló and kšt. For men, wa marks a mild opinion and yewa´ marks stronger opinions. The corresponding women's forms are ma and yemá, respectively. Yo (men) and ye (women) mark neutral commands, yethó (men) and nithó / ithó (women) mark familiar, and ye (both men and women) and na mark requests. He is used by both genders to mark direct questions, but men also use huwó in more formal situations. So (men) and se (women) mark dubitative
Dubitative mood

Dubitative mood is a grammatical mood found in some languages, that indicates that the statement is dubious, doubtful, or uncertain.An example can be taken from Ojibwe language, an Algonquian languages of North America....
questions (where the person being asked is not assumed to know the answer).

While many native speakers
First language

A first language is the language a human being learns from birth. A person's first language is a basis for sociolinguistic identity....
and linguists
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
agree that certain enclitics are associated with particular genders
Gender

Gender comprises a range of differences between man and woman, extending from the biological to the social. Biologically, the male gender is defined by the presence of a Y-chromosome, and its absence in the female gender....
, such usage may not be exclusive. That is, individual men sometimes use enclitics associated with women, and vice versa (Trechter 1999).

Examples of enclitic usage
Phrases
"Hokahe!" is a phrase used by traditional Lakota people during battle. It means "let's go". Crazy Horse
Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse was a respected war leader of the Oglala Lakota, who fought against the U.S. federal government in an effort to preserve the traditions and values of the Lakota people way of life....
was known to use it to mean "charge!" It can be contracted to just "ho!". According to a Lakota Holy Man, Eagle Voice, as recounted by Nebraska poet John Neihardt
John Neihardt

Johnathan Gneisenau Neihardt was an United States author of poetry and prose, an amateur historian and ethnographer, and a philosophy of the Great Plains....
, it is literally translated as "Hold fast. There is more!"

"Háu kola", literally, "Hello, friend," is the most common greeting, and was transformed into the generic motion picture American Indian "How!", just as the traditional feathered headdress of the Teton was "given" to all movie Indians. As "háu" is the only word in Lakhota which contains a diphthong
Diphthong

In phonetics, a diphthong, or , is a contour vowel?that is, a unitary vowel that changes vowel quality during its pronunciation, or "glides", with a glissando of the tongue from one articulation to another, as in the English words eye, boy, and cow. This contrasts with "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, where the tongue is held s...
, /au/, it may be a loanword from a non-Siouan language, possibly from the English "How do you do?"

Learning Lakota

Few resources are available for self-study of Lakota by a person with no or limited access to native speakers of Lakota. Here is a collection of some resources currently available:

Lakhótiya Wóglaka Po! - Speak Lakota! : Level 1 & Level 2 Textbooks and Audio CDs by Lakota Language Consortium. (elementary/secondary school level)
New Lakota Dictionary. (ISBN 0-9761082-9-1)
Lakota: A Language Course for Beginners by Oglala Lakota College (ISBN 0-88432-609-8) (The companion 15 CDs/Tapes (11 hours) (high school/college level)
Reading and Writing the Lakota Language by Albert White Hat Sr. (ISBN 0-87480-572-4) (high school/college level)
University of Colorado
University of Colorado at Boulder

The University of Colorado at Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado. Considered a Public Ivy, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado system and was founded five months before Colorado was admitted to the union in 1876....
Lakhota Project: Beginning Lakhota, vol. 1 & 2, Elementary Bilingual Dictionary and Graded Readings, (high school/college level)
Lakota Dictionary: Lakota-English/English-Lakota, New Comprehensive Edition by Eugene Buechel, S.J. & Paul Manhart (ISBN 0-8032-6199-3)
A Grammar of Lakota by Eugene Buechel, S.J. (ASIN B000AO4ZCK) (professional level)
The article by Rood & Taylor, in #References (professional level)

Bibliography

Buechel, Eugene. (1983). A Dictionary of Teton Sioux. Pine Ridge, SD: Red Cloud Indian School.
DeMallie, Raymond J. (2001). Sioux until 1850. In R. J. DeMallie (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 2, pp. 718-760). W. C. Sturtevant (Gen. Ed.). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-16-050400-7.
Mithun, Marianne (1999). The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parks, Douglas R.; & Rankin, Robert L. (2001). The Siouan languages. In Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 1, pp. 94-114). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
de Reuse, Willem J. (1987). One hundred years of Lakota linguistics (1887-1987). Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, 12, 13-42. (Online version: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/handle/1808/509).
de Reuse, Willem J. (1990). A supplementary bibliography of Lakota languages and linguistics (1887-1990). Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, 15 (2), 146-165. (Studies in Native American languages 6). (Online version: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/handle/1808/441).
Rood, David S. and Allan R. Taylor. (1996). Sketch of Lakhota, a Siouan Language. Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 17 (Languages), pp. 440-482. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. (Online version: http://lakxotaiyapi.freecyberzone.com/sk0.htm)
Trechter, Sarah. (1999). Contextualizing the Exotic Few: Gender Dichotomies in Lakhota. In M. Bucholtz, A.C. Liang, and L. Sutton (Eds) Reinventing Identities (pp. 101-122). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN:0195126297
Ullrich, Jan. (2008). New Lakota Dictionary. (Lakota Language Consortium). ISBN 0-9761082-9-1.

External links

(Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre)