Kiowa language

Kiowa, in the language itself Ǥáuiđòᵰ:gyà, is a Tanoan language spoken by the Kiowa people, primarily in Caddo, Kiowa, and Comanche counties, Oklahoma. The Kiowa tribal center is located in Carnegie. Like most North American indigenous languages, Kiowa is an endangered language.

Origins

Although Kiowa is most closely related to the other Tanoan languages of the Pueblos, the earliest historic location of its speakers is western Montana around 1700. Prior to the historic record, oral histories, archaeology, and linguistics suggest that pre-Kiowa was the northernmost dialect of Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan, spoken at Late Basketmaker II Era sites. Around AD 450, they migrated northward through the territory of the Ancestral Puebloans and Great Basin, occupying the eastern Fremont culture region of the Colorado Plateau until sometime before 1300. Speakers then drifted northward to the northwestern Plains, arriving no later than the mid-16th century in the Yellowstone area where the Kiowa were first encountered by Europeans. The Kiowa then later migrated to the Black Hills and the southern Plains, where the language was recorded in historic times.

Demographics

Colorado College anthropologist Laurel Watkins noted in 1984 based on Parker McKenzie's estimates that only about 400 people could speak Kiowa and that only rarely were children learning the language. A more recent figure from McKenzie is 300 adult speakers of "varying degrees of fluency" reported by Mithun out of a 12,242 Kiowa tribal membership.
The Intertribal Wordpath Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving native languages of Oklahoma, estimates the maximum number of fluent Kiowa speakers as of 2006 to be 400. A 2013 newspaper article estimated 100 fluent speakers. UNESCO classifies Kiowa as 'severely endangered.' It claims the language had only 20 mother-tongue speakers in 2007, along with 80 second language speakers, most of whom were between the ages of 45 and 60.

Revitalization efforts

The University of Tulsa, the University of Oklahoma in Norman, and the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha offer Kiowa language classes.
Kiowa hymns are sung at Mount Scott Kiowa United Methodist Church.
Starting in the 2010s, the Kiowa Tribe offered weekly language classes at the Jacobson House, a nonprofit Native American art center in Norman, Oklahoma. Dane Poolaw and Carol Williams taught the language using Parker McKenzie's method.
Alecia Gonzales, who taught at USAO, wrote a Kiowa teaching grammar called Thaum khoiye tdoen gyah: beginning Kiowa language. Modina Toppah Water edited Saynday Kiowa Indian Children’s Stories, a Kiowa language book of trickster stories published in 2013.
In 2022, Tulsa Public Schools signed an agreement with the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma to teach Kiowa language and culture in the district.
, the Kiowa Tribe has a Kiowa Language Department.

Phonology

There are 23 consonants:
Kiowa distinguishes six vowel qualities, with three distinctive levels of height and a front-back contrast. All six vowels may be long or short, oral or nasal. Four of the vowels occur as diphthongs with a high front off-glide of the form vowel +.
There are 24 vowels:

	Front	Back
High
Mid
Low

Contrasts among the consonants are easily demonstrated with an abundance of minimal and near-minimal pairs. There is no contrast between the presence of an initial glottal stop and its absence.

IPA	Example	Meaning
		'female's sister'
		'fire; hill; heavy'
		'food eating'
		'foggy'
		'deer'
		'dry'
		'eye'

The ejective and aspirated stops are articulated forcefully. The unaspirated voiceless stops are tense, while the voiced stops are lax.
The voiceless alveolar fricative is pronounced before

Orthography	Pronunciation	Meaning
sét		'bear'
syân		'be small'
sân		'child'

The lateral is realized as in syllable-initial position, as lightly affricated in syllable-final position, and slightly devoiced in utterance-final position. It occurs seldom in word-initial position.

célê		'set'
gúldɔ		'be red, painted'
sál		'be hot'

The dental resonants and are palatalized before.

tʰàlí		'boy'
bõnî		'see'

All consonants may begin a syllable but may not occur word-initially outside of loan-words. The only consonants which may terminate a syllable are.
Certain sequences of consonant and vowel do not occur: dental and alveolar obstruents preceding ; velars and preceding . These sequences do occur if they are the result of contraction: 'then he got up'
The glide automatically occurs between all velars and, except if they are together as the result of a conjunction, or in loanwords.
Nasalization of voiced stops operates automatically only within the domain of the pronominal prefixes: voiced stops become the corresponding nasals either preceding or following a nasal. The velar nasal that is derived from is deleted; there is no in Kiowa.
Underlying surfaces in alternating forms as following velars, as following labials and as if accompanied by falling tone.
Obstruents are devoiced in two environments: in syllable-final position and following a voiceless obstruent. Voiced stops are devoiced in syllable-final position without exception. In effect, the rule applies only to and since velars are prohibited in final position.
The palatal glide spreads across the laryngeals and, yielding a glide onset, a brief moment of coarticulation and a glide release. The laryngeals and are variably deleted between sonorants, which also applies across a word boundary.

Orthography

Kiowa has been written in several writing systems based on the Latin alphabet. One Kiowa alphabet was developed by native speaker Parker McKenzie, who had worked with J. P. Harrington and later with other linguists. The development of the orthography is detailed in Meadows & McKenzie. However, McKenzie's use of letters such as,,, to represent consonant sounds different from their English values was not universally adopted. Another system was developed by an SIL field school. Parker McKenzie and Dane Poolaw reduced the number of diacritics in the 2010s. The current alphabet uses the barred letters and. However, there are problems with Unicode support. The combining diacritic used here,, does not display properly in many fonts. Unicode considers these letters to be allographs of the stem-struck letters Ƀ ƀ, Đ đ, Ǥ ǥ, and says that the difference should be handled by a custom font. A few fonts, such as Gentium and Andika, do use character variants to handle the difference, but more commonly a hack is used, where these letters are substituted by their basic-Latin equivalents preceded by a square bracket: B [b, [D [d, [G [g, plus ñ for. Unicode support is pending for.
The alphabetical order is monophthong followed by [diphthong; these are intercalated among the consonants as in the English alphabet. Vowel length and tone are ignored, except when two words are otherwise spelled the same. The nasalization mark comes after the vowel but is alphabetized as a separate letter, e.g. for comes between auin and auio.

Vowels

The mid-back vowel is indicated by a digraph. The four diphthongs indicate the offglide with the letter following the main vowel. In the earlier orthography, nasal vowels were indicated with a macron under the vowel letter, and a long vowel with a macron above, thus for a long nasal vowel. In the current orthography, these are indicated with a barred n and a colon, thus the same long nasal vowel is now. The length mark appears after the nasalization mark, e.g. for and for.
Tone is indicated with diacritics. The acute accent represents high tone, the grave accent indicates low tone, and the circumflex indicates falling tone, exemplified on the vowel o as,, . The previous long nasal vowel with high tone is thus or.

Consonants

For the consonants, the letters represent the same sounds as in the IPA. The letter represents the palatal glide.
The letters represent the aspirated stops, but only at the start of a syllable. At the end of a syllable, instead represent unaspirated preglottalized stops, or may merge as a glottal stop. The spelling of the voiceless unaspirated plosives and affricates varies between different systems:
Velar plosive phonemes are regularly palatalized before the vowel phoneme. This glide is written in Harrington's vocabulary, but is omitted in McKenzie's writing system. The glottal stop is also not written as it is often deleted and its presence is predictable. A final convention is that pronominal prefixes are written as separate words instead of being attached to verbs.

Morphology

Nouns

Number inflection

Kiowa, like other Tanoan languages, is characterized by an inverse number system. Kiowa has four noun classes. Class I nouns are inherently singular/dual, Class II nouns are inherently dual/plural, Class III nouns are inherently dual, and Class IV nouns are mass or noncount nouns. If the number of a noun is different from its class's inherent value, the noun takes the suffix -gau.

class	singular	dual	plural
I	–	–	-gau
II	-gau	–	–
III	-gau	–	-gau
IV

Mithun gives as an example chē̱̂ "horse/two horses" made plural with the addition of -gau: chē̱̂gau "horses". On the other hand, the Class II noun tṓ̱sè "bones/two bones" is made singular by suffixing -gau: tṓ̱sègau "bone."

Verbs

Kiowa verbs consist of verb stems that can be preceded by prefixes, followed by suffixes, and incorporate other lexical stems into the verb complex. Kiowa verbs have a complex active–stative pronominal system expressed via prefixes, which can be followed by incorporated nouns, verbs, or adverbs. Following the main verb stem are suffixes that indicate tense/aspect and mode. A final group of suffixes that pertain to clausal relations can follow the tense-aspect-modal suffixes. These syntactic suffixes include relativizers, subordinating conjunctions, and switch-reference indicators. A skeletal representation of the Kiowa verb structure can be represented as the following:
The pronominal prefixes and tense/aspect-modal suffixes are inflectional and required to be present on every verb.

Pronominal inflection

Kiowa verb stems are inflected with prefixes that indicate:

All these of the categories are indicated for only the primary animate participant. If there is also a second participant, the number of the second participant is also indicated. A participant is primary in the following cases:

A volitional agent participant is primary if it is the only participant in the clause.
In two-participant volitional agent/non-agent clauses:
# The non-agent participant is primary when
#* the non-agent is not in the first person singular or third person singular AND
#* the volitional agent is singular
# The volitional agent participant is primary when
#* the non-agent is in the first person singular or third person singular AND
#* the volitional agent is non-singular

The term non-agent here refers to semantic roles including involitional agents, patients, beneficiaries, recipients, experiencers, and possessors.