Hidatsa language

Hidatsa /hɪˈdɑːtsə/ is an endangered Siouan language, closely 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 Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

More recently, the Hidatsa language was the subject of work in the generative grammar tradition.

Sacagawea

Linguists working on Hidatsa since the 1870s have considered the name of Sacagawea, 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 [tsaɡáàɡa] 'bird' and míà [míà] 'woman'. The compound is written as Cagáàgawia 'Bird Woman' in modern Hidatsa orthography, and pronounced [tsaɡáàɡawia] (/m/ is pronounced [w] between vowels in Hidatsa). The double /aa/ 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, therefore in the Hidatsa pronunciation all syllables in [tsaɡáàɡawia] are pronounced with roughly the same relative emphasis. However, most English speakers perceive the accented syllable (the long é/aa/) as stressed. In faithful rendering of the name Cagáàgawia to other languages, it is advisable to emphasize the second, long syllable, not the last, as is common in English.