Kiowa language

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.^[2]

Colorado College anthropologist Laurel Watkins noted in 1984 based on Parker McKenzie's estimates that only about 400 people (mostly over the age of 50) 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 (1999) out of a 12,242 Kiowa tribal membership (US Census 2000).

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.^[3] A 2013 newspaper article estimated 100 fluent speakers.^[4] 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.^[1]

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.^{[5][failed verification][dead link‍]}

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.^[6]

Alecia Gonzales (Kiowa/Apache, 1926–2011), who taught at USAO, wrote a Kiowa teaching grammar called Thaum khoiye tdoen gyah: beginning Kiowa language. Modina Toppah Water (Kiowa) edited Saynday Kiowa Indian Children’s Stories, a Kiowa language book of trickster stories published in 2013.^[4][7]

In 2022, Tulsa Public Schools signed an agreement with the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma to teach Kiowa language and culture in the district.^[8] The Kiowa do have a Kiowa Language Department in 2024^[9]

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 + /j/.

There are 24 vowels:

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.

The ejective and aspirated stops are articulated forcefully. The unaspirated voiceless stops are tense, while the voiced stops are lax.

The voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ is pronounced [ʃ] before /j/

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

The dental resonants /l/ and /n/ are palatalized before /i/.

All consonants may begin a syllable but /l/ may not occur word-initially outside of loan-words (/la.yãn/ 'lion'). The only consonants which may terminate a syllable are /p, t, m, n, l, j/.

Certain sequences of consonant and vowel do not occur: dental and alveolar obstruents preceding /i/ (*tʼi, tʰi, ti, di, si, zi); velars and /j/ preceding /e/ (*kʼe, kʰe, ke, ɡe, je). These sequences do occur if they are the result of contraction: /hègɔ èm hâ/ [hègèm hâ] 'then he got up'

The glide /j/ automatically occurs between all velars and /a/, except if they are together as the result of a conjunction (/hègɔ á bõ꞉/ [hègá bõ꞉] 'then he saw them'), or in loanwords ([kánò] 'American' >Sp. Americano).

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 /ɡ/ is deleted; there is no /ŋ/ in Kiowa.

Underlying //ia// surfaces in alternating forms as /ja/ following velars, as /a/ following labials and as /iː/ 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 /b/ and /d/ since velars are prohibited in final position.

The palatal glide /j/ spreads across the laryngeals /h/ and /ʔ/, yielding a glide onset, a brief moment of coarticulation and a glide release. The laryngeals /h/ and /ʔ/ are variably deleted between sonorants, which also applies across a word boundary.

Kiowa has been written in several writing systems based on the Latin alphabet. One Kiowa alphabet was developed by native speaker Parker McKenzie,^[10] who had worked with J. P. Harrington and later with other linguists. The development of the orthography is detailed in Meadows & McKenzie (2001). However, McKenzie's use of letters such as ⟨f⟩, ⟨v⟩, ⟨j⟩, ⟨x⟩ to represent consonant sounds different from their English values was not universally adopted.^[11] Another system was developed by an SIL field school.^[12] Parker McKenzie and Dane Poolaw reduced the number of diacritics in the 2010s.^{[citation needed]} The current alphabet uses the barred letters B̶ b̶, D̶ d̶, G̶ g̶ and n̶. However, there are problems with Unicode support. The combining diacritic used here, U+0336 ̶ COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY, 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 n̶. Unicode support is pending for n̶.

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. ⟨auiñ⟩ for /ɔ̃i̯/ comes between auin and auio.^[13]