Wichita language
Wichita is an extinct Caddoan language once spoken in Oklahoma by the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. The last fluent heritage speaker, Doris Lamar-McLemore, died in 2016, although in 2007 there were three first-language speakers alive. This has rendered Wichita functionally extinct; however, the tribe offers classes to revitalize the language and works in partnership with the Wichita Documentation Project of the University of Colorado, Boulder. 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 As late as 2007 there were three living native speakers, but the last known fluent native speaker, Doris Lamar-McLemore, 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 . 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 (⟨c⟩ = ). 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 & 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 (ʔ), 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. - long vowel V - short vowel C - consonant # - preceding sound ends word Taylor also