text: Mandan has two main dialects: Nuptare and Nuetare. Only the Nuptare variety survived into the 20th century, and all speakers were bilingual in Hidatsa. Linguist Mauricio Mixco of the University of Utah has been involved in fieldwork with remaining speakers since 1993. , there were only six fluent speakers of Mandan still alive. , programs in local schools encourage students' learning the language.
  The Mandan and their language received much attention from European Americans, in part because their lighter skin color caused speculation they were of European origin. In the 1830s, Prince Maximilian of Wied spent more time recording Mandan over all other Siouan languages and additionally prepared a comparison list of Mandan and Welsh words (he thought that the Mandan may have been displaced Welsh). The theory of the Mandan–Welsh connection was also supported by George Catlin, but researchers have found no evidence of such ancestry.
  Mandan has different grammatical forms that depend on the sex of the addressee. Questions asked of men must use the suffix -oʔša while the suffix -oʔrą is used when asking of women. Likewise the indicative suffix is -oʔs when addressing men and -oʔre when addressing women, and also for imperatives: -ta (male), -rą (female). Mandan, like many other North American languages, has elements of sound symbolism in their vocabulary. A  sound often denotes smallness/less intensity,  denotes medium-ness,  denotes largeness/greater intensity:
  síre "yellow"
  šíre "tawny"
  xíre "brown"
  sró "tinkle"
  xró "rattle"
  History