The Pawnee language is a

Caddoan language 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 ...

traditionally spoken by Pawnee Native Americans, currently inhabiting in north-central Oklahoma. Historically, the Pawnee lived along the Platte River in what is now

Nebraska Nebraska () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by South Dakota to the north; Iowa to the east and Missouri to the southeast, both across the Missouri River; Kansas to the south; Colorado to the so ...

Dialects

Two important

dialect 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 ...

divisions are evident in Pawnee: South Band and ''Skiri''. The distinction between the two dialects rests on differences in their respective

phonetic 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. ...

inventory and lexicon.

Status

Prior to colonization and US expansion, Pawnee was spoken by all members of the Nation. Today Pawnee is only spoken fluently by a shrinking number of elderly speakers. As more young people shift to English as their first language, the transmission of Pawnee and its vitality are seriously endangered. As of 2007, the Pawnee Nation is developing teaching materials for the local high school and for adult language classes. There are also extensive documentary materials in the language archived at the American Indian Studies Research Institute. The Pawnee language can be heard spoken in the 2015 movie '' The Revenant''. In 2019 and 2020, the Pawnee Nation has posted online videos teaching the Pawnee language.

Phonology

The following describes the South Band dialect.

Consonants

Pawnee has eight

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced ...

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

s, and according to one analysis of medial- and final-position glottal stops, one may posit a ninth consonant phoneme. * is predictable when it occurs in the middle of words. However, since is not completely predictable at the end of words, it may also need to be considered a phoneme.

Vowels

Pawnee has four short

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...

phonemes and four long counterparts (also phonemic).

Morphology

Pawnee is an ergative-absolutive polysynthetic language.

Alphabet

The Pawnee

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a s ...

has 9 consonants and 8 vowels. The letters are relatively similar in pronunciation to their English counterparts.

Consonants

Vowels

Notes

References

*American Indian Studies Research Institute. (2008)
Dictionary Database: Pawnee (Skiri and Southband dialects)
*American Indian Studies Research Institute. (2001)

* Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); . * Parks, Douglas R. (1976). ''A grammar of Pawnee''. New York: Garland. * Taylor, Allan R. (1978). eview of ''A grammar of Pawnee'' by D. Parks ''Language'', ''54'' (4), 969-972.

External links

Pawnee Language Program
sponsored by the Pawnee Nation and Indiana University {{Authority control Pawnee Indigenous languages of the North American Plains Caddoan languages Polysynthetic languages Indigenous languages of Oklahoma Endangered Caddoan languages Endangered indigenous languages of the Americas