Wichita, known natively as , is a Caddoan language that was spoken in Anadarko, Oklahoma, by the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. The last fluent heritage speaker, Doris Lamar-McLemore, died in 2016. This has rendered Wichita functionally extinct; however, the tribe offers classes to revitalize the languageWichita Language Class. Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. 18 Feb 2009 (retrieved 14 Nov 2019) and works in partnership with the Wichita Documentation Project of the University of Colorado, Boulder."Wichita: About the Project." Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder. (retrieved 17 July 2010)
Dialects When the Europeans began to settle North America, Wichita separated into three dialects; Waco, Tawakoni, and Kirikirʔi꞉s (aka, Wichita Proper). However, when the language was threatened and the number of speakers decreased, dialect differences largely disappeared.
Status By 2008, Doris Lamar-McLemore was being referred to as the last known fluent speaker. She died on 30 August 2016. This is a sharp decline from the 500 speakers estimated by Paul L. Garvin in 1950.
Classification Wichita is a member of the Caddoan language family, along with modern Caddo, Pawnee, Arikara, and Kitsai.
Phonology The phonology of Wichita is unusual, with no pure labial consonants (though there are two labiovelars /kʷ/ and /w/). There is only one nasal (depending on conflicting theory one or more nasal sounds may appear, but all theories seem to agree that they are allophones of the same phoneme, at best), and possibly a three vowel system using only height for contrast.
Consonants
Wichita has 10 consonants. In the Americanist orthography generally used when describing Wichita, is spelled , and is .
Alveolar Dorsal Glottal plain labial. Plosive Affricate Fricative Sonorant ~ Semivowel
Though neither Rood nor Garvin include nasals in their respective consonant charts for Wichita, Rood's later inclusion of nasals in phonetic transcription for his 2008 paper ("Some Wichita Recollections: Aspects of Culture Reflected in Language") support the appearance of at least . Labials are generally absent, occurring in only two roots: kammac to grind corn and camma꞉ci to hoe, to cultivate. Apart from the in these two verbs, nasals are allophonic. The allophones and are in complementary distribution: It is before alveolars ( and in geminate ) and initially before a vowel, and elsewhere. Thus its initial consonant clusters are and , and its medial and final clusters are . Final r and w are voiceless: Glottalized final consonants: One aspect of Wichita phonetics is the occurrence of glottalized final consonants. Taylor asserts that when a long vowel precedes a glottal stop, there is no change to the pronunciation. However, when the glottal stop is preceded by a short vowel, the vowel is eliminated. If the short vowel was preceded by a consonant, then the consonant is glottalized. Taylor hypothesizes that these glottalized final consonants show that the consonant was not originally a final consonant, that the proto form (an earlier language from which Wichita split off, that Taylor was aiming to reconstruct in his paper) ended in a glottal stop, and that a vowel has been lost between the consonant and glottal stop.
Original word ending Change Result Wichita example No change - (snow) - (bone)
- long vowel V - short vowel C - consonant # - preceding sound ends word Taylor also finds that previous phonetic transcriptions have recorded the phoneme (written ), as occurring after , while is recorded when preceded by . The merger; or Why Wichita Has No : In Wichita the sounds and are not differentiated when they begin a word, and word-initial *p has become . This is unusual, in that the majority of Caddoan languages pronounce words that used to begin with *w with . In Wichita, the three sounds were also merged when preceded by a consonant. Wichita shifted consonant initial *p to with other medial occurrences of *p. and remain distinct following a vowel. For example, the word for 'man' is in Wichita, but in South Band Pawnee and in Skiri Pawnee.
Phonological rules The coalescence of morpheme-final and subsequent morpheme-initial or to :
changes to whenever it follows a consonantal segment which is not or :
changes to before or . The most numerous examples involve the collective-plural prefix r- before a morpheme beginning with :
with a following or to give :
changes to before or any non-vowel:
changes to before :
, , and change to after or :
Vowels
Wichita has either three or four vowels, depending on analysis:
Front Back High ɪ ~ i ~ e Mid ɛ ~ æ (o/u) Low ɒ ~ a
These are transcribed as .
Word-final vowels are devoiced.
Though Rood employs the letter in his transcriptions, Garvin instead uses , and asserts that is a separate phoneme. However, considering the imprecision in vowel sound articulation, what is likely important about these transcriptions is that they attest to a back vowel that is not low.
Taylor uses Garvin's transcription in his analysis, but theorizes a shift of *u to medially in Wichita, but does not have enough examples to fully analyze all the possible environments. He also discusses a potential shift from *a to , but again, does not have enough examples to develop a definitive hypothesis. Taylor finds only occurs with intervocalic glottal stops.
Rood argues that is not phonemic, as it is often equivalent to any vowel + + any vowel. For example, is frequently contracted to (the high tone is an effect of the elided consonant). There are relatively few cases where speakers will not accept a substitution of vowel + + vowel for ; one of them is '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, and probably present in Estonian. 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,
'the strong one' 'the strong ones'
'let him find you' 'let him find it for you'
'there' 'here it is' (said when handing something over) '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 Rood's 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 sequences are uncommon (unless the extra-long vowels are considered sequences), consonant clusters are ubiquitous in Wichita. Words may begin with clusters such as () and (). The longest cluster noted in Wichita is five consonants, counting as a single consonant: 'while sleeping'; however, Wichita syllables are more commonly CV or CVC.
Grammar and morphology
Wichita is an agglutinative, polysynthetic language, meaning words have a root verb basis to which information is added; that is, morphemes (affixes) are added to verb roots. These words may contain subjects, objects, indirect objects, and possibly indicate possession. Thus, surprisingly complex ideas can be communicated with as little as one word. For example, means "one makes himself a fire".
Nouns do not distinguish between singular and plural, as this information is specified as part of the verb. Wichita also does not distinguish between genders, which can be problematic for English language translation.
Sentence structure is much more fluid than in English, with words being organized according to importance or novelty. Often the subject of the sentence is placed initially. Linguist David S. Rood, who has written many papers concerning the Wichita language, recorded this example, as spoken by Bertha Provost (a native speaker, now deceased) in the late 1960s.
The subject of the sentence is ancestors, and thus the sentence begins with it, instead of God, or creation (when.he.made.us.dwell). This leads one to conclude Wichita has a largely free word-order, where parts of the sentence do not need to be located next to each other to be related.
The perfective tense demonstrates that an act has been completed; on the other hand, the intentive tense indicates that a subject plans or planned to carry out a certain act. The habitual aspect indicates a habitual activity, for example: "he smokes" but not "he is smoking." Durative tense describes an activity, which is coextensive with something else.
Wichita has no indirect speech or passive voice. When using past tense, speakers must indicate if this knowledge of the past is based in hearsay or personal knowledge. Wichita has a clusivity distinction in the first person, i.e. separate ways of expressing "we" that explicitly includes or excludes the listener. Wichita also differentiates between singular, dual and plural number, instead of the simpler singular or plural designations commonly found.
Affixes Some Wichita affixes are:
Prefixes aorist a ... ki- aorist quotative aːʔa ... ki- future keʔe- future quotative eheː- perfect aɾa- perfect quotative aːɾa- indicative ta/ti- exclamatory iskiri- durative a/i- imperative hi/i- future imperative kiʔi- optative kaʔa- debetative kaɾa-
Suffixes perfective Ø imperfective -s intentive -staɾis habitual -ːss too late -iːhiːʔ
future.quotative.COOK.imperfective 'I heard she'll be cooking it.'
Instrumental suffixes
The suffix is Rá꞉hir, added to the base. Another means of expressing instrument, used only for body parts, is a characteristic position of incorporation in the verb complex. ha꞉rhiwi꞉cá꞉hir 'using a bowl' (ha꞉rhiwi꞉c 'bowl') ika꞉rá꞉hir 'with a rock' (ika꞉ʔa 'rock') kirikirʔi꞉sá꞉hir 'in Wichita (the language)' (kirikirʔi꞉s 'Wichita) iskiʔo꞉rʔeh 'hold me in your arms' (iskiʔ 'imperative 2nd subject, 1st object'; a 'reflexive possessor'; ʔawir 'arm'; ʔahi 'hold'). keʔese꞉cʔíriyari 'you will shake your head' (keʔes 'future 2nd subject'; a 'reflexive possessor'; ic 'face'; ʔiriyari 'go around'. Literally: 'you will go around, using your face').
Tense and aspect One of these tense-aspect prefixes must occur in any complete verb form. durative; directive a / i aorist (general past tense) a...ki perfect; recent past ara future quotative eheː subjunctive ha...ki exclamatory; immediate present iskiri ought kara optative kaʔa future keʔe future imperative kiʔi participle na interrogative indicative ra indicative ta negative indicative ʔa Note: kara (ought), alone, always means 'subject should', but in complex constructions it is used for hypothetical action, as in 'what would you do if...')
The aspect-marking suffixes are: perfective Ø imperfective s intentive staris generic ːss
Other prefixes and suffixes are as follows: The exclamatory inflection indicates excitement. The imperative is used as the command form. The directive inflection is used in giving directions in sequences, such as describing how one makes something. This occurs only with 2nd or 3rd person subject pronouns and only in the singular. The optative is usually translated 'I wish' or 'subject should'. Although ought seems to imply that the action is the duty of the subject, it is frequently used for hypothetical statements in complex constructions.