California Language Archive

Field Methods: The Lakota Language

2025-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Lakota language is a Siouan language predominantly spoken in and around the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada, particularly in present-day North Dakota and South Dakota. It is one of three dialects of the Sioux language, alongside Dakota and Nakoda. Lakota has a rich oral tradition and continues to play a central role in cultural practices, ceremonies, and storytelling.

Like many Indigenous languages, Lakota has faced dramatic decline due to the effects of colonization, forced assimilation, and the residential boarding school system. Today, only a few thousand fluent speakers remain, most of whom are elders. However, revitalization efforts led by community members, educators, and linguists have helped reinvigorate interest in learning and speaking Lakota.

A linguistic field methods class is a type of course offered in many university linguistics programs. These classes provide students with hands-on experience working with a speaker of a lesser-studied or endangered language, often an Indigenous or minority language. The goal is to document the structure and use of the language, typically with the help of a fluent speaker who serves as a language consultant.

Students in field methods classes learn how to:

Ask questions about pronunciation, grammar, and meaning
Build a phonetic inventory (the sounds of the language)
Understand sentence structure and word formation
Collect texts and stories
Transcribe and analyze real language data

These classes emphasize respectful collaboration and ethical practices, especially when working with Indigenous communities. The knowledge gathered can support revitalization efforts, especially when it is shared back with the community in the form of dictionaries, lesson plans, or recordings.

In the California Language Archive’s collections of Lakota materials from Berkeley graduate field methods courses (here, here, and here), all the speakers are from a reservation in South Dakota called the Oglala Sioux Tribe or the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The map below highlights in red the territory.

Stevens, Brent. (2014, September 3). About Pine Ridge Reservation. Faces of the Litte Bighorn: The David Humphreys Miller Collection.

These field methods classes were held at different times, in 1964-1965, 1974-1975, and 1980. Though the exact recruitment method is unknown, the speakers likely lived in or around the Bay Area.

Eva Martin Brown, Pine Ridge, SD (1980)
Mary Afraid of Enemy McDaniel, Pine Ridge, SD (1980)
Ruby LaPointe Swift Bird, Pine Ridge, SD (1964-1965, 1974-1975)
Stella Red Star, Pine Ridge, SD (1964-1965)

Knud Lambrecht’s field notes from the 1980 class include wordlists of various topics (kinship, animals, etc.) as well as sentences and grammatical analysis. Topics across all the fields methods classes include phonology, morphology, syntax, and miscellaneous wordlists and transcripts of the language. Some contents in the notebook include topics on question particles, tense, and gendered command differences.

Questions

Lakota questions tend to end in “he.” It always signals that the sentence is a question. For instance, “Le igmu kin hecha he?” which is “Is this a cat?” Lambrecht’s notebook has this on page 57 with “Do you eat?” being “Yata he?”

Future Tense

Lakota has a future tense particle “kte.” It changes to “kta” when it follows a question, for instance, a sentence that might translate to “Will you do X?” Here is an example of both being used in a sentence, also on page 57: “Unyake lowanpi kta he?” translating as “Will you sing for us?”

Page 57 of Knud Lambrecht's notes on Lakota from the 1980 Berkeley graduate field methods (CLA 2023-06.001)

Commands

There are different endings on commands based on the gender of the speaker. These arise in usually just two variants of the same word.

On page 90, there is “wayatkan ye!” in which “ye” is commonly stated to be a more feminine ending. This means “drink!”

On page 91, there is “ayupta yo!” in which “yo” is commonly stated to be a more masculine ending. This means “answer/reply!”

As of 2025, the Lakota language is critically endangered, with a few thousand Native speakers. The study of Lakota through field methods classes is not just about academic research — it is about healing, empowerment, and cultural survival. By combining linguistic tools with community knowledge, we can support the preservation and revitalization of languages that hold centuries of wisdom and resilience.

Whether you’re a student of linguistics, a language learner, or someone interested in Indigenous issues, methods used in a field methods class are a good toolkit to understanding the structure and meaning (as well as culture) of Lakota language.

And in the sense of cultural continuity, there is a lot to consider when discussing language revitalization. When discussing the ethics of language revitalization, a lot of time and effort must be devoted to ethical considerations on who benefits from what materials in the research process.

Gilbert Natches's Northern Paiute documentation

2022-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Every item archived in the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages tells a story. One that especially moves me, weaving together language and history, concerns the documentation created by Gilbert Natches for the Northern Paiute language, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken across a wide area in eastern California, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon. Born in the 1880s, Natches (or Natchez) was a member of a prominent Paiute family in Nevada and a landscape painter who exhibited in Reno and San Francisco. (One of his landscapes is online here.)

Natches got involved in language documentation through his relationship with the Berkeley anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960). Kroeber himself had a correspondence with W. L. Marsden, a doctor in Burns, Oregon who had learned to speak Northern Paiute well, was writing a grammar, and had assembled a collection of texts. When Marsden died in 1913, his widow Clara sent his manuscripts to Kroeber, who expressed an interest in seeing them published. But as he put it in a letter to her, this would mean “getting a Paiute Indian to come down here” to help check the spellings in the texts.

That help came from Gilbert Natches. It is not clear how Kroeber and Natches first met, but in 1913 and 1914, Natches came to San Francisco to work on the Marsden material. As it turned out, Natches was unable to do the planned work; instead, he created a significant documentary corpus of linguistic information, spoken texts, and song. This corpus contains 69 recordings; a rich notebook filled with text and song transcriptions, sentences, and vocabulary; and other materials archived at Berkeley (indexed in the California Language Archive here). One of these texts was recently published (in an edition prepared by Tim Thornes, online here), others are unpublished, including a story about tabu’u ‘cottontail.’ Presented here are the beginning of Natches’s transcript, followed by the recording (in his own voice) that he was transcribing:

Northern Paiute story about tabu'u 'cottontail' recorded and then transcribed by Gilbert Natches, Marsden.015. This is from the first page; ink additions are Alfred Kroeber's annotations.

California Language Archive · Excerpt of "Story of Cottontail" in Northern Paiute, by Gilbert Natches (1914)

One outcome of the collaboration was an article by Natches, edited by Kroeber (accessible online here). This includes several short texts and songs as well as a long list of verbs, verbal morphological elements, and nouns derived from verbs. Other nouns are mainly omitted. But Natches’s notebook from which the article was drawn has four pages of “Indian New Words for New Things,” which are almost all nouns borrowed from English. Natches’s notes include some illustrations, as in the very first word he transcribes:

Northern Paiute “Indian New Words for New Things” (mostly English loans), transcribed by Gilbert Natches, Marsden.015 (from the first of four pages). 'E' stands for a high central vowel; capitalized vowel symbols are devoiced.

At the time, in the early twentieth century, linguists often ignored loanwords and non-“traditional” vocabulary in language documentation. But the world was changing for everyone, and people’s practices and language everywhere changed with it. Natches’s “New Words” are interesting not only culturally but even in their phonology. They show many striking regularities in how English words were adapted to Northern Paiute sound patterns. For example, Northern Paiute has no consonant clusters, so English words beginning with clusters were adapted by the insertion of a vowel. The vowel is predictable based on the context: the default is o (e.g. podawa and tonookɨ for ‘flower’ and ‘trunk’); but if the English cluster is followed by u then u is used (e.g. pudumɨ for ‘broom’), and if the English cluster has an s then ɨ is used (e.g. sɨtoa and sɨtimɨ for ‘store’ and ‘steam’). In other word positions, too, Natches’s word list shows quite regular patterns of vowel insertion.

English and Northern Paiute stress patterns also differ: the position of stress is predictable in Northern Paiute, but not in English. English stress is salient enough that it led to adaptations in vowel length, so that Northern Paiute phonology would put stress on the same syllable that was stressed in English. Many one-syllable English words were adapted with lengthening (e.g. aakɨsɨ and waatsi for ‘axe’ and ‘watch’), to ensure that the first syllable would be stressed in Northern Paiute. But in one-syllable words beginning with consonant clusters, like the ones above, there was no lengthening — again, resulting in Northern Paiute stress on the same syllable as the English stress.

These adaptations would not have been conscious efforts by Natches. His native knowledge of Northern Paiute let him adapt English words according to systematic patterns that reflect Paiute phonology. If he had not chosen to write down a set of “New Words” that he judged important, later generations would not have this glimpse into the structure of the language.

Two decades after Natches’s Berkeley work, the anthropologist Saul Riesenberg met and became friendly with him. Riesenberg was a Berkeley graduate student who supported himself in a job with the Railway Post Office that took him regularly to Lovelock, Nevada. There, in 1940, he filled a notebook with English-language Paiute stories Natches shared. (The notebook is in the National Anthropological Archives in Washington, D.C., and is accessible online here.) Riesenberg reports an anecdote about the collaboration between Kroeber and Natches:

One day he startled me by saying, “You know, I wrote a paper with Alfred Kroeber on Northern Paiute verbs, and I've lost my last copy; can you get me one?” Only half-believing him I went to see Kroeber when I got back from that trip …. Kroeber gave me a reprint, and I brought it to Gilbert the next trip, and found myself unable to do any work with him for the next hour, because Gilbert sat there oblivious of me, holding that paper about an inch from his nearly blind eyes, while the most beatific smile hovered over his lips the whole time.

Gilbert Natches died in 1942 at the hospital of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City. His legacy of Northern Paiute language documentation is profound.

(This post is adapted from part of a chapter of a book, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Iconoclasm, to be published by MIT Press in 2023.)