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Mandan
Nų́ų́ʔetaa íroo
TheLord's Prayer in Mandan (1905)
Native to	United States
Region	Fort Berthold Reservation,North Dakota
Ethnicity	Mandan
Extinct	9 December 2016, with the death ofEdwin Benson[1]
Revival	Taught atFort Berthold Community College
Language family	Siouan Western Siouan Mandan
Dialects	Nuptare Nuetare
Language codes
ISO 639-3	mhq
Glottolog	mand1446
ELP	Mandan
Linguasphere	64-AAB-a
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Mandan (endonym:Nų́ų́ʔetaa íroo) is an extinctSiouan language ofNorth Dakota in the United States.^[2]

By 2009, there was just one fluent speaker of Mandan,Edwin Benson (1931–2016).^[3] The language is being taught in local school programs to encourage the use of the language.^[4] Prior to Benson's death, the Estonian linguistIndrek Park [et] worked with him for more than two years to preserve the language as much as possible.^[5] The 2020 documentaryTo Save A Language portrays Park's efforts to revive the language.^[6]

Mandan is taught atFort Berthold Community College along with theHidatsa andArikara languages.^[3] Linguist Mauricio Mixco of theUniversity of Utah has been involved in fieldwork with remaining speakers since 1993. As of 2007, extensive materials in the Mandan language at the college and at theNorth Dakota Heritage Center, inBismarck, North Dakota, remained to be processed, according to linguists.^[7]

The MHA Language Project has created language learning materials for Mandan, including a vocabulary app, a dictionary, and several books in the language. They also provide a summer learning institute and materials for teachers.^[8]

Mandan was initially thought to be closely related toHidatsa andCrow. However, since Mandan has hadlanguage contact with Hidatsa and Crow for many years, the exact relationship between Mandan and other Siouan languages (including Hidatsa and Crow) has been obscured and is currently undetermined. Thus, Mandan is most often considered to be a separate branch of the Siouan family.

Mandan has two maindialects: Nuptare and Nuetare.

Only the Nuptare variety survived into the 20th century, and all speakers were bilingual in Hidatsa. In 1999, there were only six fluent speakers of Mandan still alive.^[9]Edwin Benson, the last surviving fluent Mandan speaker, died in 2016.^[10]

The language received much attention from White Americans because of the supposedly lighter skin color of the Mandan people, which they speculated wasdue to an ultimate European origin. In the 1830sPrince Maximilian of Wied spent more time recording Mandan over all other Siouan languages and prepared a comparison list of Mandan andWelsh words (he thought that the Mandan might be displaced Welsh).^[11] The idea of a Mandan/Welsh connection was also supported byGeorge Catlin.^[12]

Will and Spinden report that themedicine men had their own secret language.^[13]

Mandan has the following consonant phonemes:

/w/ and/r/ become[m] and[n] before nasal vowels, and/r/ is realized as[ⁿd] word-initially.^[14]

Mandan is asubject–object–verb language.

Mandan has a system ofallocutive agreement and so different grammatical forms may be used that depend on thegender of theaddressee. Questions asked of men must use thesuffix-oʔsha: the suffix-oʔną is used to ask of women. Likewise, theindicative suffix is-oʔsh to address men,-oʔre to address women. The same goes for theimperative:-ta (male),-ną (female).^[15]

Mandan verbs include a set of postural verbs, which encode the shapes of the subject of the verb:^[16]

The English translations are not "A pot was sitting there," "A big village stood there," or "The river lay there." That reflects the fact that the postural categorization is required in such Mandanlocative statements.

This sectionneeds expansion. You can help byadding to it.(June 2008)

Mandan, like many other North American languages, has elements ofsound symbolism in its vocabulary. A/s/ sound often denotes smallness/less intensity,/ʃ/ denotes medium-ness,/x/ denotes largeness/greater intensity:^[17]

• síire "yellow"
• shíire "tawny"
• xíire "brown"
• seró "tinkle"
• xeró "rattle"

Compare the similar examples inLakhota.

• Carter, Richard T. (1991a). "Old Man Coyote and the wild potato: A Mandan trickster tale". In Wolfart, H. C.; Finlay, J. L. (eds.).Linguistic studies presented to John L. Finlay. Memoir. Vol. 8. Winnipeg: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics. pp. 27–43.ISBN 0-921064-08-X.
• Carter, Richard T. (1991b). "Maximilian's Ruptare vocabulary: Phililogical evidence and Mandan phonology". In Ingemann, F. (ed.).1990 Mid-America Linguistics Conference: Papers. Lawrence, KS: Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas. pp. 479–489.hdl:1808/22940.
• Chafe, Wallace (1973). "Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan". In Sebeok, T. A. (ed.).Current trends in linguistics. Vol. 10. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 1164–1209. (Republished as Chafe 1976a).
• Chafe, Wallace (1976a). "Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan". In Sebeok, T. A. (ed.).Native languages of the Americas. New York: Plenum Press. pp. 527–572.ISBN 0-306-37157-X. (Originally published as Chafe 1973).
• Chafe, Wallace (1976b).The Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan languages. Trends in linguistics: State-of-the-art report. Vol. 3. The Hague: Mouton.ISBN 90-279-3443-6.
• Coberly, Mary (1979). "A text analysis and brief grammatical sketch based on 'Trickster challenges the buffalo': A Mandan text collected by Edward Kennard".Colorado Research in Linguistics.8:19–94.
• Hollow, Robert C. (1970).A Mandan dictionary (PhD thesis). Berkeley: University of California.
• Hollow, Robert C.; Parks, Douglas (1980). "Studies in plains linguistics: A review". In Wood, W. R.; Liberty, M. P. (eds.).Anthropology on the Great Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. pp. 68–97.ISBN 0-8032-4708-7.
• Kennard, Edward (1936). "Mandan grammar".International Journal of American Linguistics.9 (1):1–43.doi:10.1086/463817.
• Lowie, Robert H. (1913). "Societies of the Hidatsa and Mandan Indians". In Lowie, R. H. (ed.).Societies of the Crow, Hidatsa, and Mandan Indians. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. Vol. 11, Part 3. pp. 219–358. (Texts are on pp. 355–358).
• Mithun, Marianne (1999).The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-23228-7.
• Mixco, Mauricio C. (1997a).Mandan. Languages of the world series: Materials. Vol. 159. Münich: LINCOM Europa.ISBN 3-89586-213-4.
• Mixco, Mauricio C. (1997b). "Mandan switch reference: A preliminary view".Anthropological Linguistics.39 (2):220–298.JSTOR 30028466.
• Parks, Douglas R.; Jones, A. Wesley; Hollow, Robert C; Ripley, David J. (1978).Earth lodge tales from the upper Missouri. Bismarck, ND: Mary College.
• Parks, Douglas R.; Rankin, Robert L. (2001). "The Siouan languages". In DeMallie, R. J. (ed.).Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 13: Plains. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. pp. 94–114.ISBN 0-16-050400-7.
• Will, George; Spinden, H. J. (1906)."The Mandans: A study of their culture, archaeology and language".Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.3 (4):81–219. (Reprinted 1976, New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation).
• Wolvengrey, Arok (1991). "A marker of focus in Mandan discourse". In Ingemann, F. (ed.).1990 Mid-America Linguistics Conference: Papers. Lawrence, KS: Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas. pp. 584–598.hdl:1808/22949.
• Wood, Raymond W.; Irwin, Lee (2001). "Mandan". In DeMaille, Raymond J. (ed.).Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 13: Plains. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

• "Native American Audio Collections: Mandan".American Philosophical Society. Archived fromthe original on 14 February 2017. Retrieved20 May 2013.
• Mandan Indian Language (Ruetare), native-languages.org
• OLAC resources in and about the Mandan language

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