Солтүстік Америка тілдері: Сиуан-Катавба тобы

Language family of North America

Siouan ('/s//uː//ən/ ) or Siouan–Catawban is a language family of North America that is located primarily in the Great Plains, Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southeastern North America with a few other languages in the east.

Authors who call the entire family Siouan distinguish the two branches as Western Siouan and Eastern Siouan or as "Siouan proper" and "Catawban". Others restrict the name "Siouan" to the western branch and use the name Siouan–Catawban for the entire family. Generally, however, the name "Siouan" is used without distinction.

Siouan languages can be grouped into Western Siouan languages and Catawban. The Western Siouan languages are typically subdivided into Missouri River languages (such as Crow and Hidatsa), Mandan, Mississippi River languages (such as Dakota, Chiwere Winnebago, and Dhegihan languages), and Ohio Valley Siouan languages (Ofo, Biloxi, and Tutelo). The Catawban branch consisting of Catawban and Woccon. Charles F. Voegelin established, on the basis of linguistic evidence, that Catawban was divergent enough from the other Siouan languages, including neighboring Siouan languages of the Piedmont and Appalachia, to be considered a distinct branch. Voegelin proposes that Biloxi, Ofo and Tutelo consistute one group which he terms Ohio Valley Siouan. This group includes various historical languages spoken by Siouan peoples not only in the Ohio River Valley, but across the Appalachian Plateau and into the Piedmont regions of present day Virginia and the Carolinas. Some of these groups migrated or were displaced great distances following European contact, ending up as far afield as present day Ontario and southern Mississippi. Collectively, Siouan languages of Appalachia and the Piedmont are sometimes grouped under the term Tutelo, Tutelo Saponi, or Yesah (Yesa:sahį) as the language historically spoken by the Monacan, Manahoac, Haliwa Saponi, and Occaneechi peoples.

Collaborative work involving a number of Siouanists started at the 1984 Comparative Siouan Workshop at the University of Colorado with the goal of creating a comparative Siouan dictionary that would include Proto Siouan reconstructions. This work yielded a different analysis of the phonemic system of Proto Siouan, which appears below:

The Yuchi isolate may be the closest relative of Sioux–Catawban, based on both sound changes and morphological comparison. In the 19th century, Robert Latham suggested that the Siouan languages are related to the Caddoan and Iroquoian languages. In 1931, Louis Allen presented the first list of systematic correspondences between a set of 25 lexical items in Siouan and Iroquoian. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wallace Chafe further explored the link between Siouan and Caddoan languages. In the 1990s, Marianne Mithun compared the morphology and syntax of all the three families. At present, this Macro Siouan hypothesis is not considered proven, and the similarities between the three families may instead be due to their protolanguages having been part of a sprachbund.