Dakota language

Dakota (also Dakhota) is a Siouan language spoken by the Dakota people of the Sioux tribes. Dakota is closely related to and mutually intelligible with the Lakota language.

Morphology

Nouns

Dakota, similar to many Native American languages, is a mainly polysynthetic language, meaning that different morphemes in the form of affixes can be combined to form a single word. Nouns in Dakota can be broken down into two two classes, primitive and derivative. Primitive nouns are nouns whose origin cannot be deduced from any other word (for example make or earth, peta or fire, and ate or father), while derivative nouns are nouns that are formed in various ways from words of other grammatical categories. Primitive nouns stand on their own and are separate from other words. Derivative nouns, on the other hand, are formed by the addition of affixes to words in other grammatical categories, such as verbs, adjectives, and other nouns.

Verbs

Verbs in Dakota can appropriate, through agglutination and synthesis, many of the pronominal, prepositional, and adverbial or modal affixes of the language. There are many verbal roots, all of which are only used once certain causative prefixes are added, forming participles. Like in English, Dakota verbs also have three persons, the first, the second, and the third. Person is indicated through the addition (first and second person) or subtraction (third person, the verb is used in its simplest form) of personal pronoun affixes. There are two forms of tense in the language, the aorist (sometimes called the indefinite) and the future. In order to express the future tense, the words kta or kte are placed after the verb, much in contrast to expressing the aorist tense, which requires no marking, but is instead derived from the context of what is being said.