Pawnee language

Pawnee or pâri pakûru’ is a Caddoan language traditionally spoken by Pawnee Native Americans, currently inhabiting north-central Oklahoma. Historically, the Pawnee lived along the Platte River in what is now Nebraska.

Dialects

Two important dialect divisions are evident in Pawnee: South Band and Skiri. The distinction between the two dialects rests on differences in their respective phonetic inventory and lexicon.
The Skiri dialect became extinct in 2001 with the death of Lula Nora Pratt.

Status

As of 2007, there are fewer than 10 native speakers, all elderly. 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 posted online videos teaching the Pawnee language.

Phonology

The following describes the South Band dialect.

Consonants

Pawnee has eight consonant phonemes, and according to one analysis of medial- and final-position glottal stops, one may posit a ninth consonant phoneme.

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Stop
Affricate
Rhotic
Fricative
Approximant

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 phonemes and four long counterparts.

	Front	Back
High
Mid-low

Phonotactics

Consonant clusters are common in Pawnee in initial, medial, and final positions. These clusters fall into a small number of types, illustrated in the table below. The sequence patterns as a single unit in initial and medial clusters, and so it is not considered a cluster in itself.

	C1	C2	Examples
Initial			cpiraːrus "to fly" kspata "flesher"
Medial			pitkus "two" istu "again"
Medial		any consonant except	rahwa "captive"
Final			wahc "to be open" ahr "to live, exist"

Vowel sequences are allowed morpheme-internally and across morpheme boundaries. Pawnee distinguishes between long vowels, doubled vowels, long + short vowel sequences, and short-long vowel sequences. No morpheme contains two long vowels in sequence, however.

Morphology

Pawnee is an ergative-absolutive polysynthetic language.

Alphabet

The Pawnee alphabet has nine consonants and eight vowels. The letters are relatively similar in pronunciation to their English counterparts.

Consonants

Spelling	Sound	English equivalents
p		poke, cup
t		top, cat
k		cool, stuck
c	~	shell, push ~ pants
s		silly, face
h		heart, ahead
r		car, ferry
w		wacky, away
′		The "-" in uh-oh

Vowels

Spelling	Sound	English equivalents
i		sit
ii		feed
e		red
ee		paid
a		nut
aa		father
u	ʊ	book
uu		rude

Other alphabets

Here are other alphabets that are used sometimes in Pawnee texts.

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