Information about the Caddoan languages

Where are these languages spoken?

Before the colonization of the Americas, these languages were spoken over a vast territory located in the center of the present United States in the region called the “Great Plains”. Today they are spoken in the states of North Dakota, Oklahoma and Kansas.

Who speaks these languages?

The speakers are members of “First Nations” in North America: the Caddo Nation, the Pawnee Nation, and the Arikara Nation (which is politically united with the Mandan and Hidatsa Nations), who inhabited the region long before Europeans arrived and before the creation of the United States.

Official Website of the Caddo Nation:

http://www.caddonation-nsn.gov/index2.html

Pawnee Nation:

http://www.pawneenation.org/

Total number of speakers (estimated):

Approximately 55 according to UNESCO

Approximately 70 according to the site ethnologue.com (SIL)

Classification

The Caddoan language family currently includes 4 languages.

Southern Branch

Caddo: 25 speakers according to UNESCO and SIL

Northern Branch

Wichita: 10 speakers according to UNESCO and 3 according to SIL

Pawnee: 10 speakers according to UNESCO and 20 according to SIL

Arikara (alternate name: Ree): 10 speakers according to UNESCO and 20 according to SIL

Kitsai: extinct

Comments on the classification of Caddoan languages:

Here we use the classification established by Mithun (1999) which is widely accepted.

– The Caddo language, including all three dialects, is considered to be the oldest branch of this family and it is very different from the other three languages. The Pawnee and Arikara languages are closely related but are not mutually intelligible with Caddo.

– The Caddoan languages were once grouped with the Siouan and Iroquoian languages under the name “Macro-Siouan family”. This grouping is regarded as hypothetical by the majority of the linguistic community, and is therefore not used here.

– The Adai language, a little documented and now extinct language, has been compared by some linguists to the Caddoan languages, but the lack of available documentation has not allowed this hypothesis to be verified to date.

Are these languages in danger?

Yes, the four languages still alive in the family are all in danger of becoming extinct in the very near future if current trends are not reversed through major revitalization efforts. They are all considered “Critically Endangered” by the UNESCO classification system (level 4 on a scale of 5).

One of the languages from this family, Kitsai, became extinct in the 1930s and it is also possible that the Wichita language is no longer spoken today. For the other languages there are only a handful of native speakers, all very old, and English is now the mother tongue of persons under 60 years of age.

Some of the Nations, the Caddo for example, have grown increasingly aware of the danger of losing an important part of their culture and have developed community preservation and language instruction programs in an effort to prevent the loss of these languages.

Institution for the preservation, revitalization and instruction of Caddo:

http://www.ahalenia.com/kiwat/

Pawnee online dictionary (with audio):

http://zia.aisri.indiana.edu/~dictsearch/

Documentation Project for the Wichita language via the DoBeS project:

http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/rood-old/Wichita/index.html

Sources :

Mithun, Marianne. The languages of Native North America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (1999).

Campbell, Lyle. American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1997)

http://www.native-languages.org/