Hidatsa language
| Hidatsa | |
|---|---|
| Native to | United States |
| Region | North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota |
| Ethnicity | Hidatsa |
|
Native speakers
|
200 and decreasing (2007) |
|
Siouan
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | hida1246 |
| Linguasphere | 64-AAA-a |
Hidatsa /hɪˈdɑːtsə/ is an endangered Siouan language that is related to the Crow language. It is spoken by the Hidatsa tribe, primarily in North Dakota and South Dakota.
A description of Hidatsa-Mandan culture, including a grammar and vocabulary of the language, was published in 1877 by Washington Matthews, a government physician who lived among the Hidatsa at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.
More recently, the language has been the subject of work in the generative grammar tradition.
Linguists working on Hidatsa since the 1870s have considered the name of Sacagawea, a guide and interpreter on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, to be of Hidatsa origin. The name is a compound of two common Hidatsa nouns, cagáàga [tsaɡáàɡa] 'bird' and míà [míà] 'woman'. The compound is written as Cagáàgawia 'Bird Woman' in modern Hidatsa orthography and pronounced [tsaɡáàɡawia] (/m/ is pronounced [w] between vowels in Hidatsa). The double /aa/ in the name indicates a long vowel and the diacritics a falling pitch pattern. Hidatsa is a pitch-accent language that does not have stress so all syllables in [tsaɡáàɡawia] are pronounced with roughly the same relative emphasis. However, most English speakers perceive the accented syllable (the long é/aa/) as stressed. In faithful rendering of the name Cagáàgawia to other languages, it is advisable to emphasize the second, long, syllable, not the last as is common in English.
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