Caddoan languages

Family of Native American languages

The Caddoan languages are a family of languages native to the Great Plains spoken by tribal groups of the central United States, from present-day North Dakota south to Oklahoma. All Caddoan languages are critically endangered, as the number of speakers has declined markedly due to colonial legacy, lack of support, and other factors.

Family division

Five languages belong to the Caddoan language family:

• Caddoan languages
  • Caddo (2 speakers)
  • Northern Caddoan
    • Wichita †
    • Pawnee–Kitsai
      • Kitsai †
      • Pawnee–Arikara
        • Pawnee (10 speakers)
        • Arikara (10 speakers)

Kitsai and Wichita have no speakers left. Kitsai stopped being spoken in the 19th century when its members were absorbed into the Wichita tribe. Wichita stopped being spoken in 2016, when the last native speaker of Wichita, Doris McLemore (who left recordings and language materials), died.

All of the remaining Caddoan languages spoken today are severely endangered. As of 2007, both the Pawnee and Arikara languages only had 10 speakers, with the Caddo language only spoken by 2 (as of 2023).^[1] Caddo and Pawnee are spoken in Oklahoma by small numbers of tribal elders. Arikara is spoken on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.

Prior to colonization and US expansion, speakers of Caddoan languages were more widespread. The Caddo, for example, lived in northeastern Texas, southwestern Arkansas, and northwestern Louisiana, as well as southeastern Oklahoma. The Pawnee formerly lived along the Platte River in what is now Nebraska.

Prehistory

Glottochronology is a controversial method of reconstructing, in broad detail, the history of a language and its relationships, though it may still provide useful insights and generalizations regarding a family's history. In the case of Proto-Caddoan, it appeared to have divided into two branches, Northern and Southern, more than 3000 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. Other than Caddo, no daughter languages are known, but some unrecorded ones likely existed in the 16th and the 17th centuries.

Northern Caddoan evolved into several different languages. The language that became Wichita, with several different dialects, branched off about 2000 years ago. Kitsai separated from the Northern Caddoan stem about 1200 years ago, and Pawnee and Arikara separated 300 to 500 years ago.^[2]

External relations

Adai, a language isolate from Louisiana is known only from a 275-word list collected in 1804, and may be a Caddoan language, however documentation is too scanty to determine with certainty.^[3] Adjacent to the Caddo lived the Eyeish or Ais—not to be confused with the Ais of Florida—who also spoke a language that may have been related to Caddoan.^[4]

Some linguists believe that the Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan languages may be connected in a Macro-Siouan language family, but their work is suggestive and the theory remains hypothetical. Similar attempts to find a connection with the Algonquian languages have been inconclusive. There is insufficient evidence for linguists to propose a hypothetical Macro-Algonquian/Iroquoian language family.^[5]

Reconstruction

Some Proto-Northern Caddoan reconstructions by Chafe (1979):^[6]: 220

For Proto-Caddoan, Chafe (1979) reconstructs the following phonemes.^[6]

• stops: /p t k/
• affricate: /ts/ ⟨c⟩
• spirant: /s/
• resonants: /w n r/ and /j/ ⟨y⟩
• laryngeals: /ʔ h/
• vowels: /i a u/

Vocabulary

Below is a list of basic vocabulary of Northern Caddoan languages from Parks (1979):^[7]

Notes

1. "Only 2 people alive can speak the Caddo language fluently. They hope a new program can save it". KERA News. 2023-03-15. Retrieved 2023-03-16.
2. "Caddoan Tree Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine", Texas Beyond History website, accessed 30 May 2011; Schleser, Karl H. Plains Indians, A.D. 500 to 1500: The Archaeological Past of Historic Groups. Norman: U of OK Press, 1994, pp. 147-148
3. "Adai." Native Languages, accessed 1 Jun 2011
4. "Who were the Ais." Texas Beyond History, accessed 1 Jun 2011
5. Mithun, Marianne. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 305
6. Chafe, Wallace L. 1979. Caddoan. In Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun (eds.), The Languages of Native America: Historical and Comparative Assessment, 213-235. Austin: University of Texas Press.
7. Parks, Douglas R. 1979. The Northern Caddoan Languages: Their Subgrouping and Time Depths. Nebraska History 60: 197-213.

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.

External links

• American Indian Studies Research Institute's Northern Caddoan Linguistic Text Corpora, Indiana University-Bloomington
• Dictionary Database Search (includes Arikara, Skiri Pawnee, South Band Pawnee, Assiniboine [Nakoda], and Yanktonai Sioux [Dakota]), Indiana University