Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: What's the Siouan language?
Siouan or Siouan–Catawban is a language family of North America that is located primarily in the Great Plains, Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southeastern North America with a few other languages in the east.
Attempts to link the Iroquoian, Siouan, and Caddoan languages in a Macro-Siouan family are suggestive but remain unproven (Mithun 1999:305).
After repeated rejections under the Croatan, Cherokee and Cheraw labels, the proto Lumbee petitioned the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1924 for recognition as "Siouan" Indians. This petition was rejected largely on the grounds that Siouan was a language, not a tribe. Moreover, there was no record of the Lumbee or their ancestors having ever spoken the Siouan or any other Indian language.
Collaborative work involving a number of Siouanists started at the 1984 Comparative Siouan Workshop at the University of Colorado with the goal of creating a comparative Siouan dictionary that would include Proto-Siouan reconstructions.[2] This work yielded a different analysis of the phonemic system of Proto-Siouan, which appears below:[3]
The ancestral Siouan "Woccon" language of the Waccamaw Siouan Indians of North Carolina was lost due to devastating population losses and social disruption of the 18th and 19th centuries. It survives as a handful of vocabulary recorded in the early 1700s.
Linguistic and historical records indicate a possible southern origin of Siouan peoples, with migrations over a thousand years ago from North Carolina and Virginia to Ohio. Some peoples continued down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River and up the Missouri River, and others across Ohio to Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, home of the Dakota. Ohio Valley Siouan (Southeastern Siouan) is a group of related Siouan languages, which included the Ofo language, Biloxi language, and the Tutelo language. The Tutelo language was a group of mutually intelligible dialects spoken by the Tutelo, Monacan, Manahoac and Nahyssan confederacies, and Occaneechi in what is now Virginia and West Virginia.
Little is known about what language the Pedee spoke. Based on a theory proposed by James Mooney in his 1894 "Siouan Tribes of the East", and reinforced by John R. Swanton in his 1936 essay "Early History of the Eastern Siouan Tribes", the Pedee are believed to have spoken a Siouan language, specifically an "Eastern" or "Southeastern" Siouan language. No vocabulary of the Pedee language has been recorded.
There is a certain amount of comparative work in Siouan–Catawban languages. Wolff (1950–51) is among the first and more complete works on the subject. Wolff reconstructed the system of proto-Siouan, and this was modified by Matthews (1958). The latter's system is shown below:
Authors who call the entire family Siouan distinguish the two branches as Western Siouan and Eastern Siouan or as Siouan-proper and Catawban. Others restrict the name "Siouan" to the western branch and use the name Siouan–Catawban for the entire family. Generally, however, the name "Siouan" is used without distinction.
Early European observers and later American scholars thought the Congaree were likely of the Siouan language family, given their geographic location and characteristics of neighboring tribes. Since the late 20th century, scholars more widely agree that the people were non-Siouan. Their language was distinct from the Siouan language, and not intelligible to their immediate Siouan neighbors, the Wateree.
Siouan languages can be grouped into the Western Siouan languages and Catawban languages. The Western Siouan languages can be divided into Missouri River languages (such as Crow and Hidatsa), Mandan, Mississippi River languages (such as Dakotan, Chiwere-Winnebago, and Dhegihan languages), and Ohio Valley Siouan branches. The Catawban languages consist only of Catawban and Woccon.
In the 19th century, Robert Latham suggested that the Siouan languages are related to the Caddoan and Iroquoian languages. In 1931, Louis Allen presented the first list of systematic correspondences between a set of 25 lexical items in Siouan and Iroquoian. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wallace Chafe further explored the link between Siouan and Caddoan languages. In the 1990s, Marianne Mithun compared the morphology and syntax of all the three families. At present, the Macro-Siouan hypothesis based on relations among Siouan, Caddoan, and Iroquoian is not universally accepted as proven.
The Catawban, or Eastern Siouan, languages form a small language family in east North America. The Catawban family is a branch of the larger Siouan a.k.a. Siouan–Catawban family.
Linguistic and historical records indicate a possible southern origin of the Siouan people, with migrations over a thousand years ago from North Carolina and Virginia to Ohio. Some continued down the Ohio River to the Mississippi and up to the Missouri. Others went down the Mississippi, settling in what is now Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Others traveled across Ohio to what is now Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, home of the Dakota.
Some linguists believe that the Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan languages may be connected in a Macro-Siouan language family, but their work is suggestive and the theory remains hypothetical. Similar attempts to find a connection with the Algonquian languages have been inconclusive. There is insufficient evidence for linguists to propose a hypothetical Macro-Algonquian/Iroquoian language family.
The Western Siouan languages, also called Siouan proper or simply Siouan, are a large language family native to North America. They are closely related to the Catawban languages, sometimes called Eastern Siouan, and together with them constitute the Siouan (Siouan–Catawban) language family.
The Mandan language or "Nų́ų́ʔetaa íroo" belongs to the Siouan language family. It was initially thought to be closely related to the languages of the Hidatsa and the Crow. However, since the Mandan language has been in contact with Hidatsa and Crow for many years, the exact relationship between Mandan and other Siouan languages (including Hidatsa and Crow) has been obscured. For this reason, linguists classify Mandan most often as a separate branch of the Siouan family.
Omaha-Ponca is a daughter language to the Siouan mother language, but has developed some of its own rules for nasalization and aspiration. What were once allophones in Proto-Siouan have become phonemes in the Omaha–Ponca language.
Kansa is a Dhegiha Siouan language, a broader category containing other languages such as Quapaw, Omaha, Ponca and Osage. This group of language falls under Mississippi Valley Siouan, which is grouped under the largest category of The Siouan Language Family.
Previous work on Proto-Siouan only posited single vowel length. However, phonemic vowel length exists in several Siouan languages such as Hidatsa, Ho-Chunk, and Tutelo. Rankin et al. (2015) analyze numerous instances of long vowels as present due to common inheritance rather than common innovation. The five oral vowels and three nasal vowels posited by earlier scholars is expanded to include a distinction between short and long vowels. The proposed Proto-Siouan vowel system appears below:
Catawba (; "Katapa" ) is one of two Eastern Siouan languages of the eastern US, which together with the Western Siouan languages formed the Siouan language family.
The Biloxi tribe are Native Americans of the Siouan language family. They call themselves by the autonym "Tanêks(a)" in Siouan Biloxi language. When first encountered by Europeans in 1699, the Biloxi inhabited an area near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico near what is now the city of Biloxi, Mississippi. They were eventually forced west into Louisiana and eastern Texas. The Biloxi language--"Tanêksąyaa ade"--has been extinct since the 1930s, when the last known native semi-speaker, Emma Jackson, died.
Woccon was one of two Catawban also known as Eastern Siouan languages of the Eastern United States. Together with the Western Siouan languages, they formed the Siouan language family. It is attested only in a vocabulary of 143 words, printed in 1709.
The Macro-Siouan languages are a proposed language family that would include the Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan families. Most linguists remain unconvinced that these languages share a genetic relationship, and the existence of a Macro-Siouan language family remains a subject of debate.
The Siouan family proper consists of some 18 languages and various dialects:"(†)" – Extinct language