The Dhegihan languages are a group of

Siouan languages Siouan or Siouan–Catawban is a language family of North America that is located primarily in the Great Plains, Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southeastern North America with a few other languages in the east. Name Authors who call the entire ...

that include Kansa– Osage, Omaha–Ponca, and

Quapaw The Quapaw ( ; or Arkansas and Ugahxpa) people are a tribe of Native Americans that coalesced in what is known as the Midwest and Ohio Valley of the present-day United States. The Dhegiha Siouan-speaking tribe historically migrated from the Ohi ...

. Their historical region included parts of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys, the

Great Plains The Great Plains (french: Grandes Plaines), sometimes simply "the Plains", is a broad expanse of flatland in North America. It is located west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, an ...

, and southeastern North America. The shared Dhegihan (Degihan) migration history and separation story places them as a united group in the late 1600s near the confluence of the

Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...

and

Tennessee Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...

rivers (southern

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...

and western

Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia to ...

) which then moved westward towards the Missouri river, and separated into different bands. However, some oral traditions and archeological evidence indicate that Dhegihan speaking peoples may have migrated west out of the Ohio River Valley much earlier. The Dhegihan languages were first described and classified as Siouan languages by James Dorsey in 1885. According to Dorsey, "Degiha" translates to "Belonging to the people of this land" or "Those who dwell here" in Omaha-Ponca. Other dialectical variants recorded by Dorsey with the same translation include "Ye-ga-ha" (Kansa), "De-ka-ha" (Osage), and "Ugapa" (Quapaw). Kansa and Osage are mutually intelligible, meaning that they are two distinct

dialects The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...

of a single language. The same is true for Omaha and Ponca. The 2nd Annual Dhegiha Gathering in 2012 brought Kansa, Quapaw, Osage, Ponca and Omaha speakers together to share best practices in language revitalization.

References

Indigenous languages of the North American Plains Indigenous languages of the North American Southeast Indigenous languages of Oklahoma Western Siouan languages {{na-lang-stub