# Kiowa language

Kiowa /ˈkaɪ.oʊ.ə/ or [Gáui[dòñ:gyà ("language of the [Gáuigú (Kiowa)") is a Tanoan language spoken by the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma in primarily Caddo, Kiowa, and Comanche counties. The Kiowa tribal center is located in Carnegie. Like most North American indigenous languages, Kiowa is an endangered language.

## Origins

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.

## Demographics

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. A 2013 newspaper article estimated 100 fluent speakers. 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.

## Revitalization efforts

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.
Starting in the 2010s, 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.
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.
In 2022, Tulsa Public Schools signed an agreement with the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma to teach Kiowa language and culture in the district. The Kiowa do have a Kiowa Language Department in 2024

## Phonology

There are 23 consonants:
| | | Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal |
| Nasal | Nasal | m | n | | | | |
| Plosive/ Affricate | voiceless | p | t | t͜s | | k | ʔ |
| Plosive/ Affricate | voiced | b | d | | | ɡ | |
| Plosive/ Affricate | aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | | | kʰ | |
| Plosive/ Affricate | ejective | pʼ | tʼ | t͜sʼ | | kʼ | |
| Fricative | voiceless | | | s | | | h |
| Fricative | voiced | | | z | | | |
| Approximant | Approximant | (w) | l | | j | | |
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.
| IPA | Example | Meaning |
| /pʼ/ | /pʼí/ | 'female's sister' |
| /pʰ/ | /pʰí/ | 'fire; hill; heavy' |
| /p/ | /pĩ/ | 'food eating' |
| /b/ | /bĩ/ | 'foggy' |
| /tʼ/ | /tʼáp/ | 'deer' |
| /tʰ/ | /tʰáp/ | 'dry' |
| /t/ | /tá/ | 'eye' |
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/
| Orthography | Pronunciation | Meaning |
| sét | [sét] | 'bear' |
| syân | [ʃẽnˀ] | 'be small' |
| sân | [sânˀ] | 'child' |
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.
| célê | [séːʲlêʲ] | 'set' |
| gúldɔ | [ɡúɫdɔ] | 'be red, painted' |
| sál | [sáɫ] | 'be hot' |
The dental resonants /l/ and /n/ are palatalized before /i/.
| tʰàlí | [tʰàlʲí] | 'boy' |
| bõnî | [bõʷnʲî] | 'see' |
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.

## Orthography

Kiowa has been written in several writing systems based on the Latin alphabet. One Kiowa alphabet 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). However, McKenzie's use of letters such as ⟨f⟩, ⟨v⟩, ⟨j⟩, ⟨x⟩ to represent consonant sounds different from their English values was not universally adopted. Another system was developed by an SIL field school. Parker McKenzie and Dane Poolaw reduced the number of diacritics in the 2010s. The tables below show the letters of the current Kiowa alphabet with their corresponding phonetic values (written in the IPA).
The alphabetical order is monophthong followed by diphthong; these are intercalated among the consonants as in the English alphabet. Vowel length and tone are ignored, except when two words are otherwise spelled the same. The nasalization mark comes after the vowel but is alphabetized as a separate letter, e.g. ⟨auiñ⟩ for /ɔ̃i̯/ comes between auin and auio.

### Vowels

    Vowels OrthographyPronunciation OrthographyPronunciation auɔ auiɔj aa aiaj ee ii oo oioj uu (in ⟨ǥu, gu, kʼu, ku⟩) uiuj
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. In the earlier orthography, nasal vowels were indicated with a macron under the vowel letter, and a long vowel with a macron above, thus ⟨ō̱⟩ for a long nasal vowel. In the current orthography, these are indicated with a barred n and a colon, thus the same long nasal vowel is now ⟨on̶꞉⟩. (The letter n̶ may be substituted with ñ or ᵰ pending proper Unicode support.) The length mark appears after the nasalization mark, e.g. ⟨auñ꞉⟩ for /ɔ̃ː/ and ⟨aiñ꞉⟩ for /ãːi̯/.
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). The previous long nasal vowel with high tone is thus ⟨ṓ̱⟩ or ⟨ón̶꞉⟩.

### Consonants

For the consonants, the letters ⟨b d g h l m n s w z⟩ represent the same sounds as in the IPA. The letter ⟨y⟩ represents the palatal glide /j/.
The letters ⟨p t k⟩ represent the aspirated stops /pʰ tʰ kʰ/, but only at the start of a syllable. At the end of a syllable, ⟨p t⟩ instead represent unaspirated preglottalized stops [ˀp ˀt], or may merge as a glottal stop [ʔ]. (The velar stop does not generally occur at the end of a syllable.) The spelling of the voiceless unaspirated plosives and affricates (plain and ejective) varies between different systems:
    Consonants with alternative spellings SoundSpellings McKenziePoolaw 2023Kiowa Language Department 2022Other /p/fb̶[bpb /t/jd̶[dtd /k/cg̶[gkg /t͜s/chts /pʼ/vpʼ /tʼ/thtʼ /kʼ/qkʼ /t͜sʼ/xtsʼ
Velar plosive phonemes /ɡ, k, kʰ, kʼ/ are regularly palatalized [ɡʲ, kʲ, kʰʲ, kʼʲ] before the vowel phoneme /a/. This glide is written in Harrington's vocabulary, but is omitted in McKenzie's writing system (which instead uses the apostrophe ⟨’⟩ after the consonant letter to mark the rare cases, found in loanwords, where unpalatalized velars occur before /a/, e.g. c’átlìn). 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.

## Morphology
### Nouns
#### Number inflection

Kiowa, like other Tanoan languages, is characterized by an inverse number system. Kiowa has four noun classes. Class I nouns are inherently singular/dual, Class II nouns are inherently dual/plural, Class III nouns are inherently dual, and Class IV nouns are mass or noncount nouns. If the number of a noun is different from its class's inherent value, the noun takes the suffix -gau (or a variant).
| class | singular | dual | plural |
| I | – | – | -gau |
| II | -gau | – | – |
| III | -gau | – | -gau |
| IV | — | — | — |
Mithun (1999:445) gives as an example chē̱̂ "horse/two horses" (Class I) made plural with the addition of -gau: chē̱̂gau "horses". On the other hand, the Class II noun tṓ̱sè "bones/two bones" is made singular by suffixing -gau: tṓ̱sègau "bone."

### Verbs

Kiowa verbs consist of verb stems that can be preceded by prefixes, followed by suffixes, and incorporate other lexical stems into the verb complex. Kiowa verbs have a complex active–stative pronominal system expressed via prefixes, which can be followed by incorporated nouns, verbs, or adverbs. Following the main verb stem are suffixes that indicate tense/aspect and mode. A final group of suffixes that pertain to clausal relations can follow the tense-aspect-modal suffixes. These syntactic suffixes include relativizers, subordinating conjunctions, and switch-reference indicators. A skeletal representation of the Kiowa verb structure can be represented as the following:
    pronominal prefix - incorporated elements (adverb + noun + verb) - VERB STEM - tense/aspect-modal suffixes - syntactic suffixes
The pronominal prefixes and tense/aspect-modal suffixes are inflectional and required to be present on every verb.

#### Pronominal inflection

Kiowa verb stems are inflected with prefixes that indicate:
* grammatical person
* grammatical number
* semantic roles of animate participants
All these of the categories are indicated for only the primary animate participant. If there is also a second participant (such as in transitive sentences), the number of the second participant is also indicated. A participant is primary in the following cases:
* A volitional agent participant (i.e. the doer of the action who also has control over the action) is primary if it is the only participant in the clause.
* In two-participant volitional agent/non-agent clauses:
** The non-agent participant is primary when
*** the non-agent is not in the first person singular or third person singular AND
*** the volitional agent is singular
** The volitional agent participant is primary when
*** the non-agent is in the first person singular or third person singular AND
*** the volitional agent is non-singular
The term non-agent here refers to semantic roles including involitional agents, patients, beneficiaries, recipients, experiencers, and possessors.
    Intransitive verbs Number PersonSingularDualPlural 1st à- è- 2nd èm-mà-bà- 3rd –è̲-á- Inverse è-
Agent transitive verbs :
| | Volitional Agent Primary Person-Number | Volitional Agent Primary Person-Number | Volitional Agent Primary Person-Number | Volitional Agent Primary Person-Number | Volitional Agent Primary Person-Number | Volitional Agent Primary Person-Number | Volitional Agent Primary Person-Number | Volitional Agent Primary Person-Number |
| Non-agent Number | 1st-Sg. | 2nd-Sg. | 2nd-Dual | 2nd-Pl. | 3rd-Sg. | 3rd-Dual | 3rd-Pl. | 1st-Dual/Pl. 3rd-Inverse |
| Sg. | gà- | à- | má-`- | bá-`- | – | é̲-`- | á-`- | é-`- |
| Dual | nèn- | mèn- | mén- | bèj- | è̱- | én- | èj- | èj- |
| Pl. | gàj- | bàj- | mán-`- | báj-`- | gà- | én-`- | gá-`- | éj-`- |
| Inverse | dé- | bé- | mén-`- | béj- | é- | én- | è- | éj- |