Hidatsa 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.
In 2019, it was estimated that there were less than 65 fluent speakers of the language.
Sacagawea
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 'bird' and míà 'woman'. The compound is written as Cagáàgawia 'Bird Woman' in modern Hidatsa orthography and pronounced ( is pronounced between vowels in Hidatsa). The double 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 are pronounced with roughly the same relative emphasis. However, most English speakers perceive the accented syllable (the long ) as stressed. In faithful rendering of the name Cagáàgawia to other languages, it is advisable to emphasize the second, long syllable, not the vowel, as is common in English.
Phonology
Stress
Primary stress in Hidatsa is predictable and occurs on the first quantity sensitive iamb of the word. Initial heavy syllables result in stress on the first syllable, while initial light syllables result in stress on the second syllable. The vowels of stressed syllables are significantly louder than those of surrounding syllables and of their unstressed counterparts.
Vowels
Hidatsa has five vowels and two diphthongs. It lacks nasal vowels, which is a way it differs from other Siouan languages. (Boyle 2007) The /a/ vowel has three sounds. The long ‘a:’ sounds like the ‘a’ in the English word, ‘father’; ‘ǎ’ has the sound of the ‘a’ in the English word ‘what’; and an obscure sound, ‘ạ’, which represents the short ‘u’ sound in English, like in the word ‘fun’.
The /e/ vowel also has three sounds. Unmarked ‘e’ has the English sound ‘ai’, like the initial syllable in the word ‘air’; ‘ě’ has the short English ‘e’ sound, such as in the word ‘den’; ‘e:’ has the sound of the English long ‘e’, like the sound of the ‘e’ in ‘they’.
The /i/ vowel has only two sounds. The ‘ǐ’ in Hidatsa sounds like the short ‘i’ sound in English, like in the word ‘pin’; the long ‘i:’ sounds like the English ‘i’ in the word ‘marine’. The /o/ and /u/ vowels have one sound each, the ‘o’ in the English word ‘bone’ and the ‘u’ in the English word ‘tune’, respectively. (Matthews 1877) The /e/ and /o/ vowels are rare and appear as long sounds. Length, as demonstrated in the table above, is phonemically distinct. There is evidence of this within some minimal and near-minimal pairs in the language:
(1) e/e
[gáre] /káre/ ‘to stick into’
[garée] /karé:/ ‘to vomit’
(2) a/a
[miŕa] /wiŕa/ ‘wood’
[miíraa] /wiíra:/ ‘goose’
(3) i/i
[máashii] /wáaši:/ ‘holy story’
[máashi] /wáaši/ ‘to buy, to hire’
Consonants
Hidatsa has ten consonant phonemes:
Unlike the Mississippi Valley Siouan languages, Hidatsa does not have the glottalized or the aspirated stops of Proto-Siouan. It has only one series of voiceless oral stop, /p,t,k/, which are voiced intervocalically as [b,d,g]. Hidatsa has one voiceless affricate, /t͡s/. The two fricatives, /ʃ/ and /x/, are voiceless when they are unaspirated. They are not voiced intervocalically.
Hidatsa has three sonorants: two glides, /w/ and /r/, as well as /h/. The glides are realized as [m] and [ŋ] after a pause, most frequently at the beginning of a word.
Morphology
Gender
In Hidatsa, the usage of different words creates a division between masculine and feminine. Words may stand alone or be added to common gender words.
Nouns of the masculine gender: 'matsé' ('man'), ṡikàka ('young man'), 'itàka' ('old man'), the terms used for male relations ('itsùka', 'idìṡi', etc.) and their compounds (such as 'makadiṡta-maste' and 'itakaḣe') are the masculine nouns for humans. The word 'kedapi' by itself means "bull" but designates the maleness of any of the lower animals in its suffix form, with or without the interposition of the adverb 'adu'.