Caddoan languages

Caddoan
Geographic distribution:	Great Plains, North America
Genetic classification:	Caddoan
Subdivisions:	Northen Southern
ISO 639-5:	cdd
Caddoan languages

The Caddoan languages are a family of Native American languages. They are spoken by Native Americans throughout the Great Plains of the central United States, from North Dakota south to Oklahoma.

Family division

Five languages belong to the Caddoan language family:

I. Northern Caddoan

A. Pawnee-Kitsai

a. Kitsai

1. Kitsai (also known as Kichai) (†)

b. Pawnee

2. Arikara (also known as Ree)

3. Pawnee (dialects: South Bend, Skiri (also known as Skidi or Wolf))

B. Wichita

4. Wichita (dialects: Wichita proper, Waco, Towakoni)

II. Southern Caddoan

5. Caddo (dialects: Kadohadacho, Hasinai, Natchitoches, Yatasi)

The Kitsai language is now extinct, as its members were absorbed in the 19th century into the Wichita tribe. Caddo, Wichita, and Pawnee are spoken in Oklahoma by small numbers of tribal elders. Arikara is spoken on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.

Speakers of some of the languages were formerly more widespread; the Caddo, for example, used to live in northeastern Texas, southwestern Arkansas, and northwestern Louisiana, as well as southeastern Oklahoma. The Pawnee formerly lived along the Platte River in what is now Nebraska.

External relations

Adai, a language isolate known only from a 275-word list, may be a Caddoan language. The documentation is too scanty to determine with certainty. Linguist Wallace Chafe finds the relationship unlikely.^{[citation needed]}

Some linguists believe that the Caddoan and Iroquoian languages may be connected in a Macro-Siouan language family, but work is suggestive and the theory remains hypothetical. Similar attempts to find a connection with the Algonkian languages has been partially useful. There is insufficient evidence for linguists to propose a hypothetical Macro-Algonkian/Iroquoian language family.^{[citation needed]}

External links

Indiana University-Bloomington American Indian Studies Research Institute's Northern Caddoan Linguistic Text Corpora site: [1] and Dictionary Database Search (includes Arikara, Skiri Pawnee, South Band Pawnee, Assiniboine [Nakoda], and Yanktonai Sioux [Dakota]):[2]

Bibliography

• Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
• Chafe, Wallace L. (1973). Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan. In T. Sebeok (Ed.), Current trends in linguistics (Vol. 10, pp. 1164-1209). The Hague: Mouton. (Reprinted as Chafe 1976).
• Chafe, Wallace L. (1976). Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan. In T. Sebeok (Ed.), Native languages in the Americas (pp. 527-572). New York: Plenum. (Originally published as Chafe 1973).
• Chafe, Wallace L. (1976). The Caddoan, Iroquioan, and Siouan languages. Trends in linguistics; State-of-the-art report (No. 3). The Hague: Mouton. ISBN 90-279-3443-6.
• Chafe, Wallace L. (1979). Caddoan. In L. Campbell & M. Mithun (Eds.), The languages of Native America: Historical and comparative assessment (pp. 213-235). Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-74624-5.
• Chafe, Wallace L. (1993). Indian languages: Siouan-Caddoan. Encyclopedia of the North American colonies (Vol. 3). New York: C. Scribner's Sons ISBN 0-684-19611-5.
• Lesser, Alexander; & Weltfish, Gene. (1932). Composition of the Caddoan linguistic stock. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 87 (6), 1-15.
• Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
• Taylor, Allan. (1963). Comparative Caddoan. International Journal of American Linguistics, 29, 113-131.