Wichita language

Wichita is a Caddoan language spoken in Anadarko, Oklahoma, by the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. The last fluent heritage speaker, Doris Lamar-McLemore, died in 2016, although in 2007 there were three first-language speakers alive. This has rendered Wichita functionally extinct; however, the tribe offers classes to revitalize the language and works in partnership with the Wichita Documentation Project of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Dialects

When the Europeans began to settle North America, Wichita separated into three dialects; Waco, Tawakoni, and Kirikirʔi꞉s. However, when the language was threatened and the number of speakers decreased, dialect differences largely disappeared.

Status

As late as 2007 there were three living native speakers, but the last known fluent native speaker, Doris Lamar-McLemore, died on 30 August 2016. This is a sharp decline from the 500 speakers estimated by Paul L. Garvin in 1950.

Classification

Wichita is a member of the Caddoan language family, along with modern Caddo, Pawnee, Arikara, and Kitsai.

Phonology

The phonology of Wichita is unusual, with no pure labial consonants. There is only one nasal, and possibly a three vowel system using only height for contrast.

Consonants

Wichita has 10 consonants. In the Americanist orthography generally used when describing Wichita, is spelled, and is.
Though neither Rood nor Garvin include nasals in their respective consonant charts for Wichita, Rood's later inclusion of nasals in phonetic transcription for his 2008 paper support the appearance of at least.

Labials are generally absent, occurring in only two roots: kammac to grind corn and camma:ci to hoe, to cultivate.
Apart from the in these two verbs, nasals are allophonic. The allophones and are in complementary distribution: It is before alveolars and initially before a vowel, and elsewhere. Thus its initial consonant clusters are and, and its medial and final clusters are.
Final r and w are voiceless:
Glottalized final consonants: One aspect of Wichita phonetics is the occurrence of glottalized final consonants. Taylor asserts that when a long vowel precedes a glottal stop, there is no change to the pronunciation. However, when the glottal stop is preceded by a short vowel, the vowel is eliminated. If the short vowel was preceded by a consonant, then the consonant is glottalized. Taylor hypothesizes that these glottalized final consonants show that the consonant was not originally a final consonant, that the proto form ended in a glottal stop, and that a vowel has been lost between the consonant and glottal stop.

Original word ending	Change	Result	Wichita example
	No change
	-
	-

Taylor also finds that previous phonetic transcriptions have recorded the phoneme , as occurring after, while is recorded when preceded by.
The merger; or Why Wichita Has No :
* In Wichita the sounds and are not differentiated when they begin a word, and word-initial *p has become. This is unusual, in that the majority of Caddoan languages pronounce words that used to begin with *w with. In Wichita, the three sounds were also merged when preceded by a consonant. Wichita shifted consonant initial *p to with other medial occurrences of *p. and remain distinct following a vowel. For example, the word for 'man' is in Wichita, but in South Band Pawnee and in Skiri Pawnee.
Phonological rules
The coalescence of morpheme-final and subsequent morpheme-initial or to :
changes to whenever it follows a consonantal segment which is not or :
changes to before or. The most numerous examples involve the collective-plural prefix r- before a morpheme beginning with :
with a following or to give :
changes to before or any non-vowel:
changes to before :
,, and change to after or :
Vowels

Wichita has either three or four vowels, depending on analysis:

	Front	Back
High	ɪ ~ i ~ e
Mid	ɛ ~ æ
Low		ɒ ~ a

These are transcribed as.
Word-final vowels are devoiced.
Though Rood employs the letter in his transcriptions, Garvin instead uses, and asserts that is a separate phoneme. However, considering the imprecision in vowel sound articulation, what is likely important about these transcriptions is that they attest to a back vowel that is not low.
Taylor uses Garvin's transcription in his analysis, but theorizes a shift of *u to medially in Wichita, but does not have enough examples to fully analyze all the possible environments. He also discusses a potential shift from *a to, but again, does not have enough examples to develop a definitive hypothesis. Taylor finds only occurs with intervocalic glottal stops.
Rood argues that is not phonemic, as it is often equivalent to any vowel + + any vowel. For example, is frequently contracted to . There are relatively few cases where speakers will not accept a substitution of vowel + + vowel for ; one of them is 'eagle'.
Rood also proposes that, with three vowels that are arguably high, mid, and low, the front-back distinction is not phonemic, and that one may therefore speak of a 'vertical' vowel inventory. This also has been claimed for relatively few languages, such as the Northwest Caucasian languages and the Ndu languages of Papua New Guinea.
There is clearly at least a two-way contrast in vowel length. Rood proposes that there is a three-way contrast, which is quite rare among the world's languages, although well attested for Mixe, and probably present in Estonian. However, in Wichita, for each of the three to four vowels qualities, one of the three lengths is rare, and in addition the extra-long vowels frequently involve either an extra morpheme, or suggest that prosody may be at work. For example,
This contrasts with Mixe, where it is easy to find a three-way length contrast without the addition of morphemes.
Under Rood's analysis, then, Wichita has 9 phonemic vowels:

	Short	Long	Overlong
High	ɪ	ɪˑ	ɪː
Mid	ɛ	ɛˑ	ɛː
Low	a	aˑ	aː

Tone

There is also a contrastive high tone, indicated here by an acute accent.

Syllable and phonotactics

While vowel sequences are uncommon, consonant clusters are ubiquitous in Wichita. Words may begin with clusters such as and . The longest cluster noted in Wichita is five consonants, counting as a single consonant: 'while sleeping'; however, Wichita syllables are more commonly CV or CVC.

Grammar and morphology

Wichita is an agglutinative, polysynthetic language, meaning words have a root verb basis to which information is added; that is, morphemes are added to verb roots. These words may contain subjects, objects, indirect objects, and possibly indicate possession. Thus, surprisingly complex ideas can be communicated with as little as one word. For example, means "one makes himself a fire".
Nouns do not distinguish between singular and plural, as this information is specified as part of the verb. Wichita also does not distinguish between genders, which can be problematic for English language translation.
Sentence structure is much more fluid than in English, with words being organized according to importance or novelty. Often the subject of the sentence is placed initially. Linguist David S. Rood, who has written many papers concerning the Wichita language, recorded this example, as spoken by Bertha Provost in the late 1960s.
The subject of the sentence is ancestors, and thus the sentence begins with it, instead of God, or creation. This leads one to conclude Wichita has a largely free word-order, where parts of the sentence do not need to be located next to each other to be related.
The perfective tense demonstrates that an act has been completed; on the other hand, the intentive tense indicates that a subject plans or planned to carry out a certain act. The habitual aspect indicates a habitual activity, for example: "he smokes" but not "he is smoking." Durative tense describes an activity, which is coextensive with something else.
Wichita has no indirect speech or passive voice. When using past tense, speakers must indicate if this knowledge of the past is based in hearsay or personal knowledge. Wichita has a clusivity distinction in the first person, i.e. separate ways of expressing "we" that explicitly includes or excludes the listener. Wichita also differentiates between singular, dual and plural number, instead of the simpler singular or plural designations commonly found.

Affixes

Some Wichita affixes are:

Instrumental suffixes

The suffix is Rá:hir, added to the base. Another means of expressing instrument, used only for body parts, is a characteristic position of incorporation in the verb complex.

ha:rhiwi:cá:hir 'using a bowl'
ika:rá:hir 'with a rock'
kirikirʔi:sá:hir 'in Wichita '
iskiʔo:rʔeh 'hold me in your arms'.
keʔese:cʔíriyari 'you will shake your head'.
Tense and aspect

One of these tense-aspect prefixes must occur in any complete verb form.

durative; directive	a / i
aorist	a...ki
perfect; recent past	ara
future quotative	eheː
subjunctive	ha...ki
exclamatory; immediate present	iskiri
ought	kara
optative	kaʔa
future	keʔe
future imperative	kiʔi
participle	na
interrogative indicative	ra
indicative	ta
negative indicative	ʔa

Note: kara
The aspect-marking suffixes are:

perfective	Ø
imperfective	s
intentive	staris
generic	ːss

Other prefixes and suffixes are as follows:

The exclamatory inflection indicates excitement.
The imperative is used as the command form.
The directive inflection is used in giving directions in sequences, such as describing how one makes something.
* This occurs only with 2nd or 3rd person subject pronouns and only in the singular.
The optative is usually translated 'I wish' or 'subject should'.
Although ought seems to imply that the action is the duty of the subject, it is frequently used for hypothetical statements in complex constructions.
The unit durative suggests that the beginning and ending of the event are unimportant, or that the event is coextensive with something else.
Indicative is the name of the most commonly used Wichita inflection translating English sentences out of context. It marks predication as a simple assertion. The time is always non-future, the event described is factual, and the situation is usually one of everyday conversation.
* The prefix is ti- with 3rd persons and ta- otherwise
The aorist is used in narratives, stories, and in situations where something that happened or might have happened relatively far in the past is meant.
The future may be interpreted in the traditional way. It is obligatory for any event in the future, no matter how imminent, unless the event is stated to be part of someone's plans, in which case intentive is used instead.
The perfect implies recently completed.
* It makes the fact of completion of activity definite, and specifies an event in the recent past.
The aorist intentive means 'I heard they were going to... but they didn't.'
The indicative intentive means 'They are going to... ' without implying anything about the evidence on which the statement is based, nor about the probability of completion.
The optional inflection quotative occurs with the aorist, future, or perfect tenses.
* If it occurs, it specifies that the speaker's information is from some source other than personal observation or knowledge.
** 'I heard that... ' or 'I didn't know, but... '
* If it does not occur, the form unambiguously implies that evidence for the report is personal observation.

Examples:
ʔarasi 'cook'

á:kaʔarásis	quotative aorist imperfective	I heard she was cooking it
kiyakaʔarásis	quotative aorist imperfective	I heard she was cooking it
á:kaʔarásiki	quotative aorist perfective	I heard she was cooking it
á:kaʔarásistaris	quotative aorist intentive	I heard she was planning on cooking it
kiyakaʔarásistaris	quotative aorist intentive	I heard she was planning on cooking it
á:kaʔarásiki:ss	quotative aorist generic	I heard she always cooked it
kiyakaʔarásiki:ss	quotative aorist generic	I heard she always cooked it
ákaʔárasis	aorist imperfective	I know myself she was cooking it
ákaʔárasiki	aorist perfective	I know myself she cooked it
ákaʔarásistaris	aorist intentive	I know myself she was going to cook it
ákaʔaraásiki:ss	aorist generic	I know myself she always cooked it
keʔárasiki	future perfective	She will cook it
keʔárasis	future imperfective	She will be cooking it
keʔárasiki:ss	future generic	She will always cook it
ehéʔárasiki	quotative future perfective	I heard she will cook it
ehéʔárasis	quotative future imperfective	I heard she will be cooking it
eheʔárasiki:ss	quotative future generic	I heard she will always be the one to cook it
taʔarásis	indicative imperfective	She is cooking it; She cooked it
taʔarásistaris	indicative intentive	She's planning to cook it
taʔarásiki::s	indicative generic	She always cooks it
ískirá:rásis	exclamatory	There she goes, cooking it!
aʔarásis	directive imperfective	Then you cook it
haʔarásiki	imperative imperfective	Let her cook it
ki:ʔárasiki	future imperative perfective	Let her cook it later
ki:ʔárasiki:ss	future imperative generic	You must always let her cook it
á:raʔarásiki	quotative perfect perfective	I heard she cooked it
á:raʔarásistaris	quotative perfect intentive	I heard she was going to cook it
áraʔárasiki	perfect perfective	I know she cooked it
keʔeʔárasis	optative imperfective	I wish she'd be cooking it
keʔeʔárasiki	optative perfective	I wish she'd cook it
keʔeʔárasistaris	optative intentive	I wish she would plan to cook it
keʔeʔárasiki:ss	optative generic	I wish she'd always cook it
keʔeʔárasiki:hi:ʔ	optative too late	I wish she had cooked it
karaʔárasis	ought imperfective	She ought to be cooking it
karaʔarásiki:ss	ought generic	She should always cook it
karaʔárasiski:hiʔ	ought too late	She ought to have cooked it