Shawnee language

Shawnee is a Central Algonquian language spoken in parts of central and northeastern Oklahoma by the Shawnee people. Historically, it was spoken across a wide region of the Eastern United States, primarily north of the Ohio River. This territory included areas within present-day Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.
Shawnee is closely related to other Algonquian languages, such as Mesquakie-Sauk and Kickapoo. It has 260 speakers, according to a 2015 census, although the number is decreasing. It is a polysynthetic language that is described as having freedom in word ordering.

Status

Shawnee is severely threatened, as many speakers have shifted to English. The approximately 200 remaining speakers are older adults. Some of the decline in usage of Shawnee resulted from the United States assimilation program carried out by Indian boarding schools, which abused, starved, and beat children who spoke their Native languages. This treatment is often extended to the families of those children as well.
Of the 4,576 citizens of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe around the city of Shawnee, Oklahoma, more than 100 are speakers. Of the 3,652 citizens of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe in Ottawa County, only a few elders are speakers. Of the 2,226 citizens of the Shawnee Tribe, or Loyal Shawnee in northeastern Oklahoma around White Oak, there are fewer than 12 speakers. Because of the low speaker population and the percentage of elderly speakers, Shawnee is classified as an endangered language. Additionally, language development outside of the home has been limited. A dictionary and portions of the Bible translated from 1842 to 1929 were translated into Shawnee.

Language revitalization

George Blanchard Sr., former governor of his tribe, teaches classes to Head Start and elementary school children, as well as evening classes for adults, at the Cultural Preservation Center in Seneca, Missouri. His work was profiled on the PBS show American Experience in 2009. The classes are intended to encourage speaking Shawnee among families at home. The Eastern Shawnee have also taught language classes. The Shawnee Tribe launched a language immersion program in 2020 with virtual and in-person classes.
Conversational Shawnee booklets, CDs, and a Learn Shawnee Language website are available.

Phonology

Vowels

Shawnee has six vowels, three of which are high, and three are low.

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Mid
Open

In Shawnee, tends to be realized as, and tends to be pronounced.
In and, a near minimal pair has been found for Shawnee 'i' and 'ii'. In and, a minimal pair has been found for Shawnee 'a' and 'aa'.
ho-wiisi'-ta 'he was in charge'
wi 'si 'dog'
caaki yaama 'all this'
caki 'small'
However, no quantitative contrasts have been found in the vowels and.

Consonants

Shawnee consonants are shown in the chart below.

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive
Fricative
Lateral
Nasal
Semivowel

and contrast in the verbal affixes -ki and -kki.
The Shawnee is most often derived from Proto-Algonquian *s.
Some speakers of Shawnee pronounce more like an alveolar. This pronunciation is especially common among Loyal Band Shawnee speakers near Vinita, Oklahoma.
and are allophones of the same phoneme: occurs in syllable-final position, while occurs at the beginning of a syllable.

Stress

Stress in Shawnee falls on the final syllable of a word.
;Consonant length
In Shawnee phonology, consonant length is contrastive. Words may not begin with vowels, and between a morpheme ending with a vowel and one starting with a vowel, a is inserted. Shawnee does not allow word-final consonants and long vowels.
These affixes are object markers in the transitive animate subordinate mode. The subject is understood.
Insertion
∅→/#____V
A word may not begin with a vowel. Instead, an on-glide is added. For example:
There are two variants of the article -oci, meaning 'from'. It can attach to nouns to form prepositional phrases, or it can also be a pre-verb. When it attaches to a noun, it is -ooci, and when attached to a pre-verb it is -hoci.
/y/ Insertion
∅→/V_____ V
When one of the vowels is long, Shawnee allows for the insertion of.
Word-final consonant deletion
C# → 0
A consonant is deleted at the end of a word.
In, a noun ends in a consonant when a locative suffix follows, but in, the consonant is deleted at the word end.
Word-final vowel shortening
V:# → V#
A long vowel is shortened at the end of a word.

Morphology

Morpho-phonology

Source:

Rule 1

t/V____V
is inserted between two vowels at the morpheme boundary.
As we know from the phonological rule stated above, a word may not begin with a vowel in Shawnee. From the morphophonological rule above, it can be assumed that ~.

example

-eecini meaning 'Indian agent' appears as hina heecini or 'that Indian agent', and as ho-eecinii-ma-waa-li, meaning 'he was their Indian agent'. The of ho-- fills the open slot that would otherwise have to be filled with.

Rule 2

V1-V2 → V2

A short vowel preceding another short vowel at a morpheme boundary is deleted.

Rule 3

V:V → V:
When a long vowel and a short vowel come together at a morpheme boundary, the short vowel is deleted.
Shawnee shares many grammatical features with other Algonquian languages. There are two third persons, proximate and obviative, and two noun classes, animate and inanimate. It is primarily agglutinating typologically, and is polysynthetic, resulting in a great deal of information being encoded on the verb. The most common word order is Verb-Subject.

Affixes

stem--transitivizing affix-object affix
The instrumental affix is not obligatory, but if it is present, it determines the type of transitivizing affix that can follow it, or by the last stem in the theme.
Instrumental affixes are as follows

Instrumental suffix
pw 'by mouth'
n 'by hand'
h 'by heat'
hh 'by mechanical instrument'
l 'by projectile'
t 'by vocal noise'
šk 'by feet in locomotion'
hšk 'by feet as agent'
lhk 'by legs'

Possessive paradigm: animate nouns

Possessor	Singular noun	Plural noun
1s	ni- + ROOT	ni- + ROOT + ki
2s	ki- + ROOT	ki- + ROOT + ki
3s	ho- + ROOT	ho- + ROOT + ki
4s	ho- + ROOT + li	ho- + ROOT + waa + li
1p	ni- + ROOT + na	ni- + ROOT + naa + ki
2+1	ki- + ROOT + na	ki- + ROOT + naa + ki
2p	ki- + ROOT + wa	ki- + ROOT + waa + ki
4p	ho- + ROOT + hi	ho- + ROOT + waa + hi

Possessive paradigm: inanimate nouns

-tθani - 'bed'

Possessor	Singular noun	Plural noun
1s	ni- + tθani	ni- + tθaniw+ali
2s	ki- + tθani	ki- + tθaniw+ali
3s	ho- + tθani	ho- + tθaniw+ali
1p	ni- + tθane+na	ni- + tθane+na
2+1	ki- + tθane+na	ki- + tθane+na
2p	ki- + tθani+wa	ki- + tθani+wa
3p	ho- + tθani+wa	ho- + tθani+wa
Locative	tθan + eki
Diminutive	tθan + ehi

Grammar and syntax

Source:

Word order

Shawnee has a fairly free word order, with VSO being the most common:
SOV, SVO, VOS, and OVS are also plausible.

Grammatical categories

Parts of speech in the Algonquian languages, Shawnee included, show a basic division between inflecting forms, and non-inflecting invariant forms. Directional particles incorporate into the verb itself. Although particles are invariant in form, they have different distributions and meanings that correspond to adverbs postpositions and interjections.

Case

Examples and below show the grammatical interaction of obviation and inverse. The narrative begins in in which grandfather is the grammatical subject in discourse-focus . In, grandfather remains in discourse-focus , but he is now the grammatical object . To align grammatical relations properly in, the inverse marker /-ekw-/ is used in the verb stem to signal that the governor is affecting the grandfather..
Since the person building the house is disjointed from the person who the house is being built for, this disjunction is marked by placing one participant in the obviative. Since the grandfather is the focus of this narrative, the governor is assigned the obviative marking. Grammatically, kapenal-ee is the subject who is not in discourse-focus, showing that grammatical relations and obviation are independent categories.
Similar interactions of inverse and obviation are found below. In Shawnee, third-person animate beings participate in obviation, including grammatically animate nouns that are semantically inanimate.