Crow (native name: or ) is a Western Siouan language spoken primarily by the Crow Tribe in present-day southeastern Montana. The word translates to "Children of the Large Beaked Bird" (from 'beak/nose', 'big', 'child'), which was later incorrectly translated into English as 'Crow'.Little Bighorn College It is one of the larger populations of American Indian languages with around 3,650 speakers according to the 2017-2021 American Community Survey.
Dialects Crow is closely related to Hidatsa spoken by the Hidatsa tribe of the Dakotas; the two languages are the only members of the Missouri Valley Siouan family. Despite their similarities, Crow and Hidatsa are not mutually intelligible.
The Crow people historically constituted two main groups: the River Crow and the Mountain Crow. However, most authors report that dialectal differences between the two groups are few.
Status According to Ethnologue with figures from 1998, 77% of Crow people over 66 years old speak the language; "some" parents and older adults, "few" high school students and "no pre-schoolers" speak Crow. 80% of the Crow Tribe prefers to speak in English. The language was classified as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO as of 2012.See UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.
However, R. Graczyk claims in his A Grammar of Crow (2007) that "unlike many other native languages of North America in general, and the northern plain in particular, the Crow language still exhibits considerable vitality: there are fluent speakers of all ages, and at least some children are still acquiring Crow as their first language." Many of the younger population who do not speak Crow are able to understand it. Almost all of those who do speak Crow are also bilingual in English. Graczyk cites the reservation community as the reason for both the high level of bilingual Crow-English speakers and the continued use and prevalence of the Crow language. Daily contact with non–American Indians on the reservation for over one hundred years has led to high usage of English. Traditional culture within the community, however, has preserved the language via religious ceremonies and the traditional clan system.
Currently, most speakers of Crow are 30 and older but a few younger speakers are learning it. There are increased efforts for children to learn Crow as their first language and many do on the Crow Reservation of Montana, particularly through a Crow language immersion school that was sponsored in 2012. Development for the language includes a Crow language dictionary and portions of the Bible published from 1980–2007. The current literacy rate is around 1–5% for first language speakers and 75–100% for second language learners. Teens are immersed in Crow at the Apsaalooke language camp sponsored by the Crow Tribe.
Classification Crow is closely related to Hidatsa spoken by the Hidatsa tribe of the Dakotas; the two languages are the only members of the Missouri Valley Siouan family. The ancestor of Crow-Hidatsa may have constituted the initial split from Proto-Siouan-Catawban. Crow and Hidatsa are not mutually intelligible, however the two languages share many phonological features, cognates and have similar morphologies and syntax. The split between Crow and Hidatsa may have occurred between 300 and 800 years ago.
Phonology
Vowels There are eight distinct vowels in Crow, three short and five long, along with two diphthongs. The mid vowels [eː] and [oː] do not have phonemic short counterparts, but they may be phonetically shortened preceding a coda consonant.
Short Long Front Back Front Back Close Mid ~ Open Diphthong
There is also a marginal diphthong ea that only occurs in two native Crow stems: 'clear' and 'intermittent'.
Consonants Crow has a relatively small consonant inventory, like many other languages in the Plains Linguistic Area.
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Plosive ~ () Fricative Sonorant ~~ ~~~
Stops are aspirated word-initially, word-finally, when geminated (e.g. [ppʰ]) and when following another stop (e.g. [ptʰ]). Stops in a consonant cluster with h as the initial radical (hp, ht, hk) are unaspirated and lax. Gemination in stops only occurs intervocalically. Intervocalic single, nongeminate stops are lax, unaspirated, and generally voiced. The difference between voiced stops b and d (allophones of m and n) and voiceless stops is hardly discernible when following a fricative, since both are unaspirated and lax. The phoneme k has a palatalized allophone [kʲ] that occurs after i, e, ch and sh, often word-finally.
Fricatives are tense; they are only lax when intervocalic. Palatal sh is often voiced intervocalically; s is sometimes voiced intervocalically; x is never voiced. The alveolar fricative /s/ has an optional allophone /h/ in phrase-initial position: sáapa "what" > [hâːpa] sapée "who" > [hapêː]
Sonorants voiced /m/ and /n/ have three allophones: w and l intervocalically, b and d word initially and following an obstruent, and m and n in all other conditions. In conservative speech, l is realized as a tapped r, however in general cases it is realized as l, perhaps due in part to the influence of English. Word initially, b is optional for /m/, though b is more commonly realized. The glottal sonorant /h/ assimilates to the nasality of the following segment, but retains its voicelessness. When following i or e or preceding ch, /h/ may be realized as an alveopalatal fricative.
The glottal stop is a defective [sic] phoneme that occurs only as the marker of interrogatives, written . dútchi? 'did you get it?' shóossdalee? 'where are you going?' In fast speech it is often omitted.
Structure Vowel sequences across morpheme boundaries can be quite varied, but short vowels cannot appear alone in the morpheme: V:V (long+short), V:V: (long+long) and diphthong+V (short). Word finally, only a (in a diphthong), o, and u (allomorphs of the plural suffix) can occur after a long vowel.
A wide variety of consonant clusters can occur in Crow. All consonants except for /h/ can be geminated. Voiced labials and dentals (phonemic m and n, allophones b, m, w and d, n, l) are resistant to clustering. Because they only occur intervocalically, l and w do not occur in clusters. The plosive allophones b and d only occur in clusters as the second consonant and only at morpheme boundaries. The nasal allophones m and n can only occur with each other with the exception of nm, which often assimilates to mm, or occur with h at a morpheme boundary. Clusters in general most often occur at morpheme boundaries.
Some morphemic constraints: A word begins either with a V (long or short) or a single C; no word-initial consonant clusters occur. Consonant clusters only occur word-internally. One exception is the morpheme sht, an emphatic sentence-final declarative marker. A word can end in any C except for p and x; word-final ch only occurs in one word, , a plural demonstrative. All lexical nouns and verb stems end in a vowel. Generally, nonderived noun and verb stems consist of between 1–4 syllables. Only long vowels or diphthongs occur in one-syllable words.
Accent Crow has a phonemic pitch-accent system, not unlike what is seen in Tokyo Japanese. The position of the accent in the stem is determined lexically and can serve to distinguish between minimal pairs. Virtually all noun and verb stems have an inherent accent. In word initial syllables, accented short vowels are generally followed by a consonant cluster, while accented long vowels are generally followed by a single consonant. Accent can fall on short vowels as well as long vowels and may fall on either mora of a long vowel. With diphthongs, either the high vowel or the schwa offglide may bear the accent.
Accent helps predict the tones of all the vowels in a word: accented vowels are high in pitch; all vowels following the accented vowel are low in pitch; all short vowels preceding the accented vowel are low in pitch; all long vowels preceding the accented vowel are high in pitch; short vowels occurring between a long vowel and the accented vowel assimilate to a high pitch. In other words, all vowels between the accented vowel and the first long vowel in the word (if there is one) are high in pitch, forming what has been described as a high pitch plateau.
In words composed of more than one morpheme, there are several rules (with a few exceptions) to determine the placement of the accent: If the first accented morpheme is accented anywhere except for the final mora of a stem-final vowel, the subsequent morpheme is unaccented. e.g., íaxchi 'reins' + úuwata 'metal' = íaxchuuwata 'bridle' If the first accented morpheme has its accent on the stem-final vowel mora, that morpheme loses its accent. e.g., bilí 'water' + chikúa 'sweet' = bilichikúa 'soda' If the morpheme following the first accent lacks lexical accent, the accent remains on the first morpheme. e.g., kootá 'like that' + ssaa 'not' = kootássaa 'not be like that' If an accented stem-final vowel is deleted when the following morpheme lacks lexical accent, the accent is transferred to the vowel mora that precedes the deleted vowel. e.g., iisá 'face' + xii 'move in a direction' = iísxii 'move forward'
Exceptions: A few stems with final falling accent have long high accent for the purposes of word formation. The punctual aspectual marker áhi overrides the regular word accent – it is always accented The exclamative sentence-final marker wík is accented in addition to the accent of the stem to which it is combined. Vowel morae that occur between the first accent and the exclamative suffix are low in pitch.
Phonological processes Phonological processes in Crow include: short vowel deletion: stem-final short vowels are deleted at a morpheme boundary unless a three-consonant cluster or a nasal plus voiceless obstruent would occur. Stem-final vowels do not delete before dak, the coordinate noun-phrase conjunction. Sentence-final evidential suffixes also do not cause the final short vowel to be deleted. nasal assimilation: n assimilates to m in a cluster; nm clusters do not occur. sibilant assimilation: alveolar s and ss are realized as [ʃ] at morpheme boundaries before all consonants except x and s. vowel neutralization: word-finally, stem-final short vowels i, a and u are neutralized to their corresponding mid nonround or round vowel: i, a become e; u becomes o. identical vowel reduction: with suffixes beginning with a, sequences of 3-4 identical vowel morae are reduced to two (aa-a and aa-aa are reduced to aa); exceptions are compounds and prefixes. long vowel reduction before h: long vowels shorten before h in a syllable coda. final schwa deletion: the final schwa of a diphthong is deleted before suffixes beginning with a and before the plural; before other vowels, it is otherwise retained. palatal-dental alternation: stem-final ch and t are complementary; t occurs before a-initial suffixes and plural u, and ch everywhere else. This relations holds parallel for sh and s; and the geminates tch [tːʃ] and ssh [ʃː]. The ch and sh forms occur before nonlow vowels, whereas t and s occur before low vowels. There are, however, a few exceptions to this complementary relationship, therefore these phonemes cannot be considered as allophones. palatal-velar alternation: there is a lexically conditioned ch to k alternation; k occurs before the plural and before suffixes beginning with a, not producing t. stem ablaut: lexically conditioned alternation affecting stem-final long vowels triggered by the plural morphemes, the imperative, and a-initial suffixes, e.g., ii to aa ablaut; ee to ii ablaut; ee to aa ablaut.
Orthography The following tables summarize the correspondences between the phonemic representation of consonants and their representation in the orthography, omitting the complications involving underlying forms.
+ Consonants Phoneme Written t͡ʃ ch t͡ʃː tch ʃ sh ʃː ssh ʃt͡ʃ sch m m, b, w n n, d, l ʔ ?