Assiniboine language

Assiniboine is a Nakotan Siouan language of the Northern Plains. The name Assiniboine comes from the term, from Ojibwe, meaning 'Stone Siouans'. The reason they were called this was that Assiniboine people used heated stone to boil their food. In Canada, Assiniboine people are known as Stoney Indians, while they called themselves [Nakota|Nakota or Nakoda], meaning 'allies'''.''

Classification

The Dakotan group of the Siouan family has five main divisions: Dakota, Dakota, Lakota, Nakoda and Nakoda. Along with the closely related Stoney, Assiniboine is an n variety of the Dakotan languages, meaning its autonym is pronounced with an initial n. The Assiniboine language is also closely related to the Sioux language and to the Stoney language, although they are hardly mutually intelligible.

D-N-L classification system

The Assiniboine language, the Dakota language and the Lakota language are usually classified into a group with D-N-L subgroup classification. As suggested by the name of the system, the variation in pronunciations of certain words follows the D-N-L rule. A typical example is given below:

Language group	'greasy'
Santee-Sisseton	sda
Yankton-Yanktonai	sda
Teton	sla
Assiniboine	sna
Stoney	thna

Santee-Sisseton and Yankton-Yanktonai are languages that belong to the Dakotan group and Teton is a language in the Lakotan group. The table above illustrates a typical variation amongst these three languages. Just as the name of these three tribes suggest, the Dakota language, the Lakota language and the Nakota language have respective inclinations towards,, and in some substitutable consonants.

Arguments against the classification system

Some scholars argue that the D-N-L classification system may not be totally accurate due to the non-rigidness of the substitution form. Siouan Indians live on an expansive continuum such that the distinction between different languages does not manifest in a rigid, clear-cutting criterion. Historically, linguists have debated on Yankton-Yanktonai languages and their proper positions into the D-N-L classification system, but the coexistence of and phonemes made such classification doubtful. This example of lexical difference between the languages of the Siouan group illustrates another possible distinction besides the D-N-L variations.

Language group	'horse'
Santee-Sisseton	súkataka
Yankton-Yanktonai	sukawaka
Teton	sukawaká
Assiniboine	súkataka
Stoney	suwatâga

Related languages

Sioux, Assiniboine, and Stoney are closely related languages of the Dakota family. Many linguists consider Assiniboine and Stoney to be dialects. However, they are mutually unintelligible. Parks and DeMallie report that they are not variant forms of a single dialect, but that Assiniboine is closer to the Sioux dialects than it is to Stoney. The exact number of interrelationships among the subdialects and dialects comprising this continuum is unknown.

Dialect group	Self-designation	Political designation
Santee-Sisseton	Dakhóta	Sioux
Yankton-Yanktonai	Dakȟóta	Sioux
Teton	Lakȟóta	Sioux
Assiniboine	Nakhóta	Assiniboine
Stoney	Nakoda	Stoney

Geographic distribution

The languages of the Dakotan group are spoken in the following regions:

Official status

The Assiniboine language is not a government-recognized official language of any state or region where Assiniboine people live. There are two reservations located in Montana, but the official language of the state is English. An estimate of native speakers ranges from less than 50, to about 100, to about 150 Assiniboine people, most of them elderly. A 2021 study of Indigenous languages in Canada put Assiniboine at 350 speakers.

Phonology

The phonemic inventory has 27 consonants, which includes aspirated, plain, and ejective stops. In addition to this, it has five oral vowels and three nasal vowels. It is a structure-preserving language. Assiniboine has no definite or indefinite articles, no nominal case system, and no verbal tense marking. Clauses unmarked are "realized", while clauses marked as "potential" by means of verbal enclitic, which is successful in producing a future/non-future distinction. The verbal system is split into active and stative. The active object pronominal affixes coincide with the stative verbs of the subject pronominal affixes.
The affricates and stops of Assiniboine are often described as voiced rather than voiceless, due to intervocalic voicing rules which result in surface voiced forms.

[Nasal vowel]s

Character	IPA symbol	Also used as
ą	ã	aⁿ, an, aη, aN
į	ĩ	iⁿ, in, iη, iN
ų	ũ	uⁿ, oⁿ, un, uη, uN

There are five oral vowels in Assiniboine,, and three nasal vowels,.
Words that follow the above rules:

'hill'
'hair'
'fog'
'otter'
'heavy'
'rice'
'to sneeze'

Syllable structure

Syllables are primarily of CV structure. While codas are possible, they are restricted and uncommon, often becoming restructured as the onset of the following syllable. Onsets may include up to two consonants but codas must be simplex. Possible onset clusters are given in the following table:

Grammar

Morphology

Morphological processes for Assiniboine language are primarily agglutinating. In addition, the character of morpheme alternation in Assiniboine may be classified in terms of phoneme loss, phoneme shift, contraction, nasalization loss, syllable loss, syntactic contraction, and syntactic alternation.

Morphophonemics

Examples from Levin.
Contraction->When two syllabics come into contact they contract as in:
;+ >
;+ >
;+ >
Phoneme loss: Syllabics
when is in medial position between and :
;>
when is in the medial position between and :
;>
when is in medial position between and :
;>
Phoneme loss: semi-syllabics
; > when:
; follows
Phoneme loss: non-syllabics
is in medial position between and or and or and or and
; >
Phoneme shift: syllabics
; > before
Phoneme shift: non-syllabics
When -- is in medial position between and
; >
When -- is in medial position between and
; >
When is in medial position between and
; >
Nasalization loss exists as follows:
; >
Syllable loss occurs as follows:
Syntactic contraction: personal inflectional morphemes
;wa 'I' + ni 'you' > ci 'I...you';
Syntactic contraction with verbal themes occurs as follows:
; + – > c;
Syntactic alternation
; > in verbal theme
;> in nomial theme
;> with the future suffix;

Syntax

Assiniboine has SOV word order. The order of elements may differ from canonical SOV; this is not free nor scrambling word order, but instead, the result of topicalization or other movements. Out-of-context sentences are always interpreted as SOV order even if it sounds odd. For example, 'the man bit the dog', unless an element is moved into a focus position. Focused element sentences are highly marked, and practically, a strange semantic reading is preferred over an interpretation of OSV. For example, the following sentence was interpreted as 'A banana ate the boy' by a native speaker, and to get the OSV reading out of it the object must be stressed, for example if the sentence was given as a reply to the question 'What did the boy eat?'.
Class 1
Class 2
'''For both class 1 and 2'''

Vocabulary

wąži – one
nųba – two
yamni – three
tópa – four
záptą – five
šákpe – six
iyušna – seven
šaknoğą – eight
napcuwąga – nine
wikcémna – ten
saba – black
ska – white
ša – red
to – blue

More words can be found in the Dakota-English Dictionary.