| Also Known As: Kiowa language
Description:
Kiowa is a Kiowa-Tanoan language spoken by the Kiowa Tribe in southwestern Oklahoma in primarily Caddo, Kiowa, and Comanche counties. The Kiowa tribal center is located in Carnegie. Like most North American languages, Kiowa is an endangered language.
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 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.
The University of Oklahoma in Norman and the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha both offer Kiowa language classes. Alecia Gonzales (Kiowa-Apache), who teaches at USAO, created a Kiowa teaching grammar called, Thaum khoiye tdoen gyah : beginning Kiowa language.
The 23 consonants of Kiowa:
The 24 Kiowa vowels:
Kiowa has phonemic oral, nasal, short, and long vowels. Kiowa also has..... full article at Wikipedia |
