Crow language

Crow is a Missouri Valley Siouan language spoken primarily by the Crow Tribe in present-day southeastern Montana. The word Apsáalooke translates to "Children of the Large Beaked Bird", which was later incorrectly translated into English as 'Crow'. It is one of the larger populations of American Indian languages with 4,160 speakers according to the 2015 US Census.

Dialects

Crow is closely related to Hidatsa spoken by the Hidatsa tribe of the Dakotas; the two languages are the only members of the Missouri Valley Siouan family. Despite their similarities, Crow and Hidatsa are not mutually intelligible.

Status

According to Ethnologue with figures from 1998, 77% of Crow people over 66 years old speak the language; "some" parents and older adults, "few" high school students and "no pre-schoolers" speak Crow. 80% of the Crow Tribe prefers to speak in English. The language was classified as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO as of 2012.
However, R. Graczyk claims in his A Grammar of Crow that "unlike many other native languages of North America in general, and the northern plain in particular, the Crow language still exhibits considerable vitality: there are fluent speakers of all ages, and at least some children are still acquiring Crow as their first language." Many of the younger population who do not speak Crow are able to understand it. Almost all of those who do speak Crow are also bilingual in English. Graczyk cites the reservation community as the reason for both the high level of bilingual Crow-English speakers and the continued use and prevalence of the Crow language. Daily contact with non–American Indians on the reservation for over one hundred years has led to high usage of English. Traditional culture within the community, however, has preserved the language via religious ceremonies and the traditional clan system.
Currently, most speakers of Crow are 30 and older but a few younger speakers are learning it. There are increased efforts for children to learn Crow as their first language and many do on the Crow Reservation of Montana, particularly through a Crow language immersion school that was sponsored in 2012. Development for the language includes a Crow language dictionary and portions of the Bible published from 1980–2007. The current literacy rate is around 1–5% for first language speakers and 75–100% for second language learners. Teens are immersed in Crow at the Apsaalooke language camp sponsored by the Crow Tribe.

Classification

Crow is closely related to Hidatsa spoken by the Hidatsa tribe of the Dakotas; the two languages are the only members of the Missouri Valley Siouan family. The ancestor of Crow-Hidatsa may have constituted the initial split from Proto-Siouan. Crow and Hidatsa are not mutually intelligible, however the two languages share many phonological features, cognates and have similar morphologies and syntax. The split between Crow and Hidatsa may have occurred between 300 and 800 years ago.

Phonology

Vowels

There are five distinct vowels in Crow, which occur either long or short with the exception of the mid vowels.
There is also a marginal diphthong ea that only occurs in two native Crow stems: déaxa 'clear' and béaxa 'intermittent'.

Consonants

Crow has a very sparse consonant inventory, much like many other languages of the Great Plains.

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive
Fricative
Sonorant	~~	~~

Stops are aspirated word-initially, word-finally, when geminated and when following another stop. Stops in a consonant cluster with h as the initial radical are unaspirated and lax. Gemination in stops only occurs intervocalically. Intervocalic single, nongeminate stops are lax, unaspirated, and generally voiced. The difference between voiced stops b and d and voiceless stops is hardly discernible when following a fricative, since both are unaspirated and lax. The phoneme k has a palatalized allophone that occurs after i, e, ch and sh, often word-finally.
Fricatives are tense; they are only lax when intervocalic. Palatal sh is often voiced intervocalically; s is sometimes voiced intervocalically; x is never voiced. The alveolar fricative /s/ has an optional allophone /h/ in phrase-initial position:

sáapa "what" >
sapée "who" >

Sonorants voiced /m/ and /n/ have three allophones: w and l intervocalically, b and d word initially and following an obstruent, and m and n in all other conditions. In conservative speech, l is realized as a tapped r, however in general cases it is realized as l, perhaps due in part to the influence of English. Word initially, b is optional for /m/, though b is more commonly realized. The glottal sonorant /h/ assimilates to the nasality of the following segment, but retains its voicelessness. When following i or e or preceding ch, /h/ may be realized as an alveopalatal fricative.

Structure

Vowel sequences across morpheme boundaries can be quite varied, but short vowels cannot appear alone in the morpheme: V:V, V:V: and diphthong+V. Word finally, only a, o, and u can occur after a long vowel.
A wide variety of consonant clusters can occur in Crow. All consonants except for /h/ can be geminated. Voiced labials and dentals are resistant to clustering. Because they only occur intervocalically, l and w do not occur in clusters. The plosive allophones b and d only occur in clusters as the second consonant and only at morpheme boundaries. The nasal allophones m and n can only occur with each other with the exception of nm, or occur with h at a morpheme boundary. Clusters in general occur at morphemic boundaries.
Some morphemic constraints:

A word begins either with a V or a single C; no word-initial consonant clusters
Consonant clusters only occur word-internally; exception: sht as a single morpheme is an emphatic sentence-final declarative marker.
A word can end in any C except for p and x; ch only occurs in one word as a plural demonstrative
All lexical nouns and verb stems end in a vowel
Generally, nonderived noun and verb stems consist of between 1–4 syllables.
Only V: or diphthongs occur in one-syllable word
Stress

in Crow is phonemic. The position of the stress in the stem is determined lexically. Virtually all noun and verb stems have an inherent stress. In word initial syllables, accented short vowels in a word initial syllable are generally followed by a consonant cluster, while accented long vowels are generally followed by a single consonant. Stress can fall on short vowels as well as long vowels and may fall on either mora of a long vowel. With diphthongs, either the long vowel or the offglide may bear the stress.
Stress helps predict the tones of all the vowels in a word: stressed vowels are high in pitch; all vowels following the stressed vowel are low in pitch; all short vowels preceding the stressed vowel are low in pitch; all long vowels preceding the stressed vowel are high in pitch; short vowels occurring between a long vowel and the accented vowel assimilate to a high pitch.
In words composed of more than one morpheme, there are several rules to determine the placement of the stress:

If the first stressed morpheme is stressed anywhere except for the final mora of a stem-final vowel, the subsequent morpheme is unstressed.
If the first stressed morpheme has its accent of the stem-final vowel mora, that morpheme loses its stress.
If the morpheme following the first stress lacks lexical stress, the stress remains on the first morpheme.
If a stress stem-final vowel is deleted when the following morpheme lacks lexical stress, the stress is transferred to the preceding vowel mora of the deleted vowel.

Exceptions:

A few stems with final falling accent have long high stress for the purposes of word formation.
The punctual aspectual marker áhi overrides the regular word accent – it is always accented
The exclamative sentence-final marker wík is stressed in addition to the stress of the stem to which it is combined. Vowel morae that occur between the first stress and the exclamative suffix are low in pitch.
Phonological processes

Phonological processes in Crow include:

short vowel deletion: stem-final short vowels are deleted at a morpheme boundary unless a three-consonant cluster or a nasal plus voiceless obstruent would occur. Stem-final vowels do not delete before dak, the coordinate noun-phrase conjunction. Sentence-final evidential suffixes also do not cause the final short vowel to be deleted.
nasal assimilation: n assimilates to m in a cluster; nm clusters do not occur.
sibilant assimilation: alveolar s and ss are realized as /sh/ at morpheme boundaries before all consonants except x and s.
vowel neutralization: word-finally, stem-final short vowels i, a and u are neutralized to their corresponding mid nonround or round vowel: i, a become e; u becomes o.
identical vowel reduction: with suffixes beginning with a, sequences of 3-4 identical vowel morae are reduced to two ; exceptions are compounds and prefixes.
long vowel reduction before h: long vowels shorten before h in a syllable coda.
final schwa deletion: the final schwa of a diphthong is deleted before suffixes beginning with a and before the plural; before other vowels, it is otherwise retained.
palatal-dental alternation: stem-final ch and t are complementary; t occurs before a-initial suffixes and plural u, and ch everywhere else. This relations holds parallel for š – s; and geminates čč and šš. The č and š alternates occur before nonlow vowels, whereas t and s occur before low vowels. There are, however, a few exceptions to this complementary relationship, therefore these phonemes cannot be considered as allophones.
palatal-velar alternation: there is a lexically conditioned č to k alternation; k occurs before the plural and before suffixes beginning with a, not producing t.
stem ablaut: lexically conditioned alternation affecting stem-final long vowels triggered by the plural morphemes, the imperative, and a-initial suffixes. (ii to aa ablaut; ee to ii ablaut; ee to aa ablaut.