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]

Starting in the 2010's 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]

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 orthography was developed by native speaker Parker McKenzie, who had worked with J. P. Harrington and later with other linguists. The development of the orthography is detailed in Meadows & McKenzie (2001). The tables below show each orthographic symbol used in the Kiowa writing system and its corresponding phonetic value (written IPA).

Vowels

Orthography	Pronunciation	Orthography	Pronunciation
a	a	ai	aj
au	ɔ	aui	ɔj
e	e
i	i
o	o	oi	oj
u	u	ui	uj

The mid-back vowel /ɔ/ is indicated by a digraph ⟨au⟩. The four diphthongs indicate the offglide /j/ with the letter ⟨i⟩ following the main vowel. Nasal vowels are indicated by underlining the vowel letter: nasal o is thus ⟨o̲⟩. Long vowels are indicated with macron diacritics: long o is thus ⟨ō⟩. Short vowels are unmarked. Tone is indicated with diacritics. The acute accent ⟨´⟩ represents high tone, the grave accent ⟨`⟩ indicates low tone, and the circumflex ⟨ˆ⟩ indicates falling tone, exemplified on the vowel o as ⟨ó⟩ (high), ⟨ò⟩ (low), ⟨ô⟩ (falling). Since long vowels also have tones, the vowel symbols can have both a macron and a tone diacritic above the macron: ⟨ṓ⟩ (long high), ⟨ṑ⟩ (long low), ⟨ō̂⟩ (long falling).

Consonants

Orthography	Pronunciation	Orthography	Pronunciation
b	b	ch	ts
f	p	x	tsʼ
p	pʰ	s	s
v	pʼ	z	z
d	d	l	l
j	t	y	j
t	tʰ	w	w
th	tʼ	h	h
g	ɡ	m	m
c	k	n	n
k	kʰ
q	kʼ

The palatal glide [j] that is pronounced after velar consonants ⟨g, c, k, q⟩ (which are phonetically /ɡ, k, kʰ, kʼ/, respectively) is not normally written.[9] There are, however, a few exceptions where [ɡ] is not followed by a [j] glide, in which case an apostrophe ⟨’⟩ is written after the g as ⟨g’⟩. Thus, there is, for example, ⟨ga⟩ which is pronounced [ɡja] and ⟨g’a⟩ which is pronounced [ɡa]. The glottal stop /ʔ/ is also not written as it is often deleted and its presence is predictable. A final convention is that pronominal prefixes are written as separate words instead of being attached to verbs.

Like many scripts of India, such as Devanagari, the Kiowa alphabet is ordered according to mostly phonetic principles. The alphabetical order is shown in the tables above: Vowels first, then consonants, reading down the columns, left column then right.

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• McKenzie, Andrew. (2012). The role of contextual restriction in reference-tracking. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst. http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3518260.
• McKenzie, Parker; & Harrington, John P. (1948). Popular account of the Kiowa Indian language. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press.
• Meadows, William C.; McKenzie, Parker P. (2001). "The Parker P. McKenzie Kiowa orthography: How written Kiowa came into being". Plains Anthropologist. 46 (176): 233–248. doi:10.1080/2052546.2001.11932030. S2CID 164090335. Archived from the original on 2012-11-05.
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• Palmer, Jr., Gus (Pánthâidè). (2004). Telling stories the Kiowa way.
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Kiowa language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• The Power of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography
• Vocabulary of the Kiowa Language , John P. Harrington, 1928; full book digitized by Google, public domain in the US
  • A Grammar of Kiowa: Appendix 3: Orthographies , Laurel J. Watkins, 1984; writing systems for Kiowa