Siouan languages were spoken in aboriginal North America in a broad belt stretching from what is now Arkansas northward and westward across the western prairies and eastern great plains to Alberta. In addition there were Siouan languages scattered in the East in what is now Virginia, Alabama and Mississippi. The languages we will be discussing in this chapter are primarily Crow and Hidatsa, of the Missouri River subgroup, and Dakotan (including Dakota and Lakota dialects) and Dhegihan (including Omaha, Ponca, Kansa, Osage and Quapaw) of the Mississippi Valley subgroup. Data from other languages will be introduced as necessary.

Typology

Typologically, Siouan languages are primarily head-marking, active–stative, AOV, SV languages of moderate morphological complexity. Verbs are the most highly inflected category, and they may optionally include numerous and productive instances of noun incorporation. There are also many lexicalised noun–verb compounds. Sapir (1921: 142) characterised Dakota Sioux as ‘complex pure-relational’ in basic type with derivational concepts signalled by agglutinating elements and pure relational (mostly inflectional) concepts somewhat fused. Dakota's overall morphological technique he characterised as ‘agglutinative-fusional’ and degree of synthesis he characterised as ‘synthetic (mildly polysynthetic)’.

Incorporation

Compared with languages like Inuit or Iroquoian we would probably not want to characterise Dakotan, or the rest of Mississippi Valley Siouan, as productively incorporating, but Siouan verbs do incorporate a number of notions that speakers of most European languages would convey with separate words. And these include pronominal, instrumental, locative and directional concepts.