PAWNEE LANGUAGE

The 'Pawnee language' is a Caddoan language spoken by Pawnee Native Americans located in North central Oklahoma. Once the language of thousands of Pawnees, today Pawnee is spoken by a shrinking number of elderly speakers, and as more young people continue to learn English as their first language, the status of Pawnee declines towards extinction.

Contents

Dialects

Sounds

Consonants

Vowels

Grammar

References

External links

Dialects

Two important dialect divisions are evident in Pawnee: South Band and Skiri. The distinction between the two dialects rests on differences in their respective phonetic inventory and lexicon.

Sounds

The sounds described in this section belong to the South Band dialect of Pawnee.

Consonants

Pawnee has eight consonant phonemes, and according to one analysis of medial- and final-position glottal stops, one may posit a ninth consonant phoneme.

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar	Glottal
'Stop'
'Affricate'
'Rhotic'
'Fricative'
'Approximant'

★ is predictable when it occurs in the middle of words. However, since is not completely predictable at the ends of words, it may also need to be considered as a (phonemic) consonant.

Vowels

Pawnee has four short vowel phonemes and four long counterparts (also phonemic).

	Front	Back
'High'
'Mid-low'

Grammar

Pawnee is a polysynthetic language and displays ergativity between nouns and verbs.

References

★ Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.

★ Parks, Douglas R. (1976). ''A grammar of Pawnee''. New York: Garland.

★ Taylor, Allan R. (1978). [Review of ''A grammar of Pawnee'' by D. Parks]. ''Language'', ''54'' (4), 969-972.

External links

★ Ethnologue report for Language

★ Rosetta Project Archive