Wichita language

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Wichita is a moribund Caddoan language spoken in Oklahoma. Only three fluent speakers remain, and the language is spoken very rarely, even among those who can still hold conversations in Wichita. Wichita will probably become extinct sometime in the future.

Sounds

Wichita has been claimed to be unusually asymmetrical at a phonemic level, though this is less apparent at a phonetic level.

Consonants

Wichita has 10 consonants. In the Americanist orthography generally used when describing Wichita, [ts] is spelled , and [j] .

	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar		Glottal
			plain	labial
Plosive	t		k	kʷ	ʔ
Affricate	ts
Fricative	s
Sonorant	ɾ ~ n
Approximant		j		w	h

• Labials are generally absent, occurring in only two roots: kammac to grind corn and camma:ci to hoe, to cultivate.
• Nasals are allophonic. The allophones r and n are in complementary distribution, and the bilabial nasal m occurs in the two verb roots mentioned above.

Vowels

Wichita has 4 clusters of vowel-quality allophones:

	Front	Back
High	ɪ ~ i ~ e
Mid	ɛ ~ æ	(o)
Low		ɒ ~ a

These are transcribed as i, e, a, o.

Word-final vowels are devoiced.

Rood argues that [o] is not phonemic, as it is often equivalent to any vowel + /w/ + any vowel. For example, [awa] is frequently contracted to [ó:] (the high tone is an effect of the elided consonant). There are relatively few cases where speakers will not accept a substitution of vowel + /w/ + vowel for [o] one of them is [kó:s] 'eagle'.

Rood also proposes that, with three vowels that are arguably high, mid, and low, the front-back distinction is not phonemic, and that one may therefore speak of a 'vertical' vowel inventory (see below). This also has been claimed for relatively few languages, such as the Northwest Caucasian languages and the Ndu languages of Papua New Guinea.

There is clearly at least a two-way contrast in vowel length. Rood proposes that there is a three-way contrast, which is quite rare among the world's languages, although well attested for Mixe. However, in Wichita, for each of the three to four vowels qualities, one of the three lengths is rare, and in addition the extra-long vowels frequently involve either an extra morpheme, or suggest that prosody may be at work. For example,

:niːchíːːʔih 'the strong one' ('ch' is pronounced [tsh])

:niːːchíːːʔih 'the strong ones'

:heːhirʔíːras 'let him find you'

:heːːhirʔíːras 'let him find it for you'

:hárah 'there'

:háːrih 'here it is' (said when handing something over)

:háːːrih 'that one'

(Note that it is common in many languages to use prosodic lengthening with demonstratives such as 'there' or 'that'.)

This contrasts with Mixe, where it is easy to find a three-way length contrast without the addition of morphemes.

Under Roods analysis, then, Wichita has 9 phonemic vowels:

	Short	Long	Overlong
High	ɪ	ɪˑ	ɪː
Mid	ɛ	ɛˑ	ɛː
Low	a	aˑ	aː

Tone

There is also a contrastive high tone, indicated here by an acute accent.

Syllable and phonotactics

While vowel clusters are uncommon (unless the extra-long vowels are clusters), consonant clusters are ubiquitous in Wichita. Words may begin with clusters such as [kskh] (kskhaːrʔa) and [rh] (rhincʔa). The longest cluster noted in Wichita is five consonants long, counting [ts] as a single consonant /c/: nahiʔinckskih 'while sleeping'. However, Wichita syllables are more commonly CV or CVC.

Grammar

It is agglutinative, but surface forms often differ to actual morphemic shapes due to the usage of a series of unusual phonological processes at morpheme boundaries.

Wichita utterances can include single words that would require a full sentence in English: kiyaːkíriwaːcʔárasarikitaʔahíːriks 'he brought the big quantity of meat up to the top by means of many trips'.

External links

• [Ethnologue: Wichita]
• [Exploration of the Red River of Louisiana, in the year 1852 / by Randolph B. Marcy ; assisted by George B. McClellan.] hosted by the [Portal to Texas History.] See [Appendix H], which compares the English, Comanche, and Wichita languages.

Bibliography

• Curtis, Edward. (1907-1930). The North American Indian (pp. 230-237). Cambridge. (20 volumes; reprinted 1970).
• Garvin, Paul. (1950). Wichita I: Phonemics. International Journal of American Linguistics, 16, 179-184.
• Marcy. (1853). (pp. 307-308).
• Rood, David S. (1971). Agent and object in Wichita. Lingua, 28, 100-107.
• Rood, David S. (1971). Wichita: An unusual phonology system. Colorado Research in Linguistiscs, 1, R1-R24. (?)
• Rood, David S. (1973). Aspects of subordination in Lakhota and Wichita. CLSs, 71-88.
• Rood, David S. (1975). Implications of Wichita phonology. Language, 51, 315-337.
• Rood, David S. (1975). Wichita verb structure: Inflectional categories. In Crawford (Ed.), (pp. 121-134).
• Rood, David S. (1976). Wichita grammar. New York: Garland.
• Rood, David S. (1977). Wichita texts. International Journal of American Linguistics-NATS 2.1, 91-128.
• Rood, David S.; & Taylor, Allan. (1996). Sketch of Wichita, a Caddoan language. In HNAI (Vol. 17, pp. 580-608).
• Rood, David S. (1998). 'To be' in Wichita. In Hinton & Munro (Eds.), (pp. 190-196).
• Schmitt. (1950).
• Schmitt, Karl; & Schmitt, Iva Osanai. (1952). Wichita kinship past and present. Norman, OK: U. Book Exchange.
• Schoolcraft, Henry. (1851-1857). Historical and statistical information respecting the history, condition, and prospects of the Indian tribes of the US. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo.
• Schoolcraft, Henry. (1953). (pp. 709-711).
• Spier, Leslie. (1924). Wichita and Caddo relationship terms. American Anthropologist, 26, 258-263.
• Vincent, Nigel. (1978). A note on natural classes and the Wichita consonant system. International Journal of American Linguistics, 44, 230-232.
• Whipple. (1856). Reports of explorations and surveys to ascertain the most practicable and economic route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean (pp. 65-68). Washington: War Department. [information on the Waco dialect].

 

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