Kansa is a
Siouan language
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 ...
of the
Dhegihan
The Dhegihan languages are a group of Siouan languages that include Kansa– Osage, Omaha–Ponca, and Quapaw. Their historical region included parts of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys, the Great Plains, and southeastern North America. T ...
group once spoken by the
Kaw
Kaw or KAW may refer to:
Mythology
* Kaw (bull), a legendary bull in Meitei mythology
* Johnny Kaw, mythical settler of Kansas, US
* Kaw (character), in ''The Chronicles of Prydain''
People
* Kaw people, a Native American tribe
Places
* Kaw, Fr ...
people of
Oklahoma
Oklahoma (; Choctaw language, Choctaw: ; chr, ᎣᎧᎳᎰᎹ, ''Okalahoma'' ) is a U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States, bordered by Texas on the south and west, Kansas on the nor ...
.
Vice President Charles Curtis
Charles Curtis (January 25, 1860 – February 8, 1936) was an American attorney and Republican politician from Kansas who served as the 31st vice president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 under Herbert Hoover. He had served as the Senate ...
spoke Kansa as a child. The last mother-tongue speaker, Ralph Pepper, died in June 1982.
Classification
Kansa is a Dhegiha Siouan language, a broader category containing other languages such as Quapaw, Omaha, Ponca and Osage. This group of languages falls under Mississippi Valley Siouan, which is grouped under the largest category of The Siouan Language Family.
History
The speakers of Kansa, known as the Kaw people, lived together with the Siouan-speakers in a united nation known as the Dhegiha Siouan group. This group was originally situated north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River and then moved west down the Ohio River. After this migration, the Dhegiha Siouan group split into five subgroups or tribes that were known as the Poncas, Osages, Omahas, Quapaws and the Kaws. Later on the Kaw migrated west of Missouri river and were called the "People of the Southwind."
The languages of the 5 tribes originating from the single Dhegiha group are extremely similar and have been considered as dialects of each other.
Geographic distribution
The language was only spoken in Kansas and is no longer spoken natively since all of the speakers have died. Members of the tribe now use English, but some are able to understand certain phrases or words in the language.
There are, however,
language revitalization
Language revitalization, also referred to as language revival or reversing language shift, is an attempt to halt or reverse the decline of a language or to revive an extinct one. Those involved can include linguists, cultural or community groups, o ...
efforts ongoing.
Scholarship and resources
Pioneering anthropologist and linguist
James Owen Dorsey
James Owen Dorsey (October 31, 1848 – February 4, 1895) was an American ethnologist, linguist, and Episcopalian missionary in the Dakota Territory, who contributed to the description of the Ponca, Omaha, and other southern Siouan languages. H ...
collected 604 Kansa words in the 1880s and also made about 25,000 entries in a Kansa-English dictionary which has never been published. Dorsey also collected 24 myths, historical accounts, and personal letters from nine Kansa speakers.
In 1974, linguist Robert L. Rankin met Walter Kekahbah (d. 1979), Ralph Pepper (d. 1982), and Maud McCauley Rowe (d. 1977), the last surviving native speakers of Kansa. Rankin made extensive recordings of all three, especially Rowe, and his work over the next 31 years documented the language and helped the Kaw Nation to develop language learning materials.
[Ranney, Dave. “Researchers try to preserve Indian languages.”](_blank)
accessed 12 Apr 2011
Phonology
Kansa has 29 consonants and 8 vowels.
/ɛ/ is
phonetically
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
open-mid, whereas /o/ is phonetically
close-mid. Additionally, /a/ and /o/ can also be pronounced as
and
respectively.
Grammar
Kansa does not use tenses or a plural of a noun. Unlike English, they position the verb at the end of a sentence and the verb contains details about who or what performs and receives the action. For example, ni ''kóⁿbla'' means "Water, I want it." Also, a word like ''síⁿga'' can mean "squirrel" or "squirrels."
Vocabulary
The Kansa language has a lot of words similar to the other tribes originated from the Dhegiha Siouan group.
The following table lists compares cognates in Kansa and Osage:
Language revitalization
As of 2012, the Kaw Nation offers online language learning for Kansa second language speakers.
The 2nd Annual Dhegiha Gathering in 2012 brought Kansa,
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 ...
,
Osage,
Omaha
Omaha ( ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Nebraska and the county seat of Douglas County. Omaha is in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, about north of the mouth of the Platte River. The nation's 39th-largest city ...
and
Ponca
The Ponca ( Páⁿka iyé: Páⁿka or Ppáⁿkka pronounced ) are a Midwestern Native American tribe of the Dhegihan branch of the Siouan language group. There are two federally recognized Ponca tribes: the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska and the Ponca ...
speakers together to share best practices in language revitalization.
References
External links
Kansa language at the Kaw Nation(extensive online language study resources and texts)
OLAC resources in and about the Kansa languageEnglish to Kansa DictionaryKanza Language for Families and CommunitiesExamining the Development of Kaw Writing
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kansa Language
Kaw tribe
Indigenous languages of Oklahoma
Western Siouan languages
Languages extinct in the 1980s
Native American language revitalization