Kickapoo (Kickapoo: ) is either a dialect of the

Fox language Fox (known by a variety of different names, including Mesquakie (Meskwaki), Mesquakie-Sauk, Mesquakie-Sauk-Kickapoo, Sauk-Fox, and Sac and Fox) is an Algonquian languages, Algonquian language, spoken by a thousand Meskwaki, Sauk people, Sauk, an ...

or a closely related language, closely related to, and

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

with, the dialects spoken by the

Sauk people The Sauk or Sac (Sauk language, Sauk: ''Thâkîwaki'') are Native Americans in the United States, Native Americans and Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands. Their historical territory was near Green Bay, Wisconsin. Today they have t ...

and Meskwaki people. Their language is included in the

Central Algonquian languages The Central Algonquian languages are commonly grouped together as a subgroup of the larger Algonquian family, itself a member of the Algic family. Though the grouping is often encountered in the literature, it is an areal grouping, not a geneti ...

subgroup of the

Algonquian languages The Algonquian languages ( ; also Algonkian) are a family of Indigenous languages of the Americas and most of the languages in the Algic language family are included in the group. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from ...

family, itself a member of the

Algic languages The Algic languages (also Algonquian–Wiyot–Yurok or Algonquian–Ritwan) are an indigenous language family of North America. Most Algic languages belong to the Algonquian subfamily, dispersed over a broad area from the Rocky Mountains to ...

family. In 1985, the Kickapoo Nation's School in

Horton, Kansas Horton is a city in Brown County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 1,523. History Horton was founded in 1886. It was named for Albert H. Horton, chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court. On Jan ...

, began a language-immersion program for elementary school grades to revive teaching and use of the Kickapoo language in kindergarten through grade 6. Efforts in language education continue at most Kickapoo sites. In 2010, the Head Start Program at the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas reservation, which teaches the Kickapoo language, became "the first Native American school to earn Texas School Ready! (TSR) Project certification." Despite these efforts, there are no children who are first-language users of Kickapoo, as they choose to speak English instead. Also in 2010, Mexico's

Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH, ''National Institute of Anthropology and History'') is a Federal government of the United Mexican States, Mexican federal government bureau established in 1939 to guarantee the researc ...

participated in the elaboration of a Kickapoo alphabet. The Kickapoo in Mexico are known for their

whistled speech Whistled speech is a form of speech surrogacy in which whistling is used to mimic speech. Speakers of more than 80 languages have been found to practice various degrees of whistled speech, most of them in rugged topography or dense forests, wher ...

. Texts, recordings, and a vocabulary of the language are available. The Kickapoo language and members of the Kickapoo tribe were featured in the movie '' The Only Good Indian'' (2009), directed by Greg Wilmott and starring

Wes Studi Wesley Studi (; born December 17, 1947) is a Native American (Cherokee Nation) actor and film producer. He has garnered critical acclaim and awards throughout his career, particularly for his portrayal of Native Americans in film. In 2019, he ...

. This was a fictionalized account of Native American children forced to attend an Indian boarding school, where they were forced to speak English and give up their cultural practices.

Sounds

Consonants

Eleven

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s are used in Kickapoo: * The voiceless sounds can sometimes be voiced as , , , , * in word-initial position can also be aspirated as . * can also be pronounced as . * Glides /, / may also be heard as non-syllabic vowels []. * can be pronounced as in fast speech.

Vowels

The eight vowel sounds in Kickapoo are: short and long . * Sounds , can also be phonetically heard as

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

s and can be heard as .

Writing system

A Kickapoo alphabet was developed by Paul Voorhis in 1974 and was revised in 1981. A new orthography is used by the Kickapoo Language Development Program in Oklahoma. *

References

Central Algonquian languages Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands Indigenous languages of the North American Plains {{IndigenousAmerican-lang-stub