Stoney—also called Nakota, Nakoda, Isga, and formerly Alberta Assiniboine—is a member of the Dakota subgroup of the Mississippi Valley grouping of the

Siouan languages Siouan 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. Name Authors who call the entire ...

. The Dakotan languages constitute a dialect continuum consisting of Santee-Sisseton ( Dakota), Yankton-Yanktonai ( Dakota), Teton ( Lakota),

Assiniboine The Assiniboine or Assiniboin people ( when singular, Assiniboines / Assiniboins when plural; Ojibwe: ''Asiniibwaan'', "stone Sioux"; also in plural Assiniboine or Assiniboin), also known as the Hohe and known by the endonym Nakota (or Nakod ...

, and Stoney. Stoney is the most linguistically divergent of the Dakotan dialects and has been described as “on the verge of becoming a separate language”. The Stoneys are the only Siouan people that live entirely in Canada, and the Stoney language is spoken by five groups in Alberta. No official language survey has been undertaken for every community where Stoney is spoken, but the language may be spoken by as many as a few thousand people, primarily at the Morley community.

Relationship to Assiniboine

Stoney’s closest linguistic relative is

. The two have often been confused with each other due to their close historical and linguistic relationship, but they are not mutually intelligible. Stoney either developed from Assiniboine, or both Stoney and Assiniboine developed from a common ancestor language.

Phonology

Very little linguistic documentation and descriptive research has been done on Stoney. However, Stoney varieties demonstrate broad phonological similarity with some important divergences. For example, the following phonemes are reportedly found in Morley Stoney, spoken on the Morley Reserve: For comparison, these phonemes reportedly characterize the Stoney spoken at Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation, which maintains the common Siouan three-way contrast between plain, aspirated, and ejective stops: Notice that Alexis Stoney, for example, has innovated contrastive vowel length, which is not found in other Dakotan dialects. Alexis Stoney also has long and nasal mid vowels:

Writing system

Word Set (includes numbers)

* One — Wazhi * Two — Nûm * Three — Yamnî * Four — Ktusa * Five — Zaptâ * Man — Wîca * Woman — Wîyâ * Sun — Wa * Moon — Hâwi * Water — Mini

Phonetic differences from other Dakotan languages

The following table shows some of the main phonetic differences between Stoney,

, and the three dialects ( Lakota, Yankton-Yanktonai and Santee-Sisseton) of

Sioux The Sioux or Oceti Sakowin (; Dakota: /otʃʰeːtʰi ʃakoːwĩ/) are groups of Native American tribes and First Nations peoples in North America. The modern Sioux consist of two major divisions based on language divisions: the Dakota and ...

. To be precise, Ullrich states that Stoney "is completely unintelligible to Lakota and Dakota speakers", while Assiniboine is not comprehensible to them, "unless they have been exposed to it extensively" (p. 2).

References

External links

Ethnologue.com

{{Languages of Montana Indigenous languages of the North American Plains First Nations languages in Canada Western Siouan languages Indigenous languages of Montana