[4] The speakers of Kansa, known as the Kaw people, lived together with the Siouan-speakers in a united nation known as the Dhegiha Siouan group.

Following their westward migration, the Dhegiha Siouan group branched into five indigenous tribes (Sioux subgroups) known mainly as Ponca, Osage, Omaha, Quapaw or Kaw people.

Pioneering anthropologist and linguist James Owen Dorsey collected 604 Kansa words in the 1880s and also made about 25,000 entries in a Kansa-English dictionary which has never been published.

[7] In 1974, linguist Robert L. Rankin met Walter Kekahbah (d. 1979), Ralph Pepper (d. 1982), and Maud McCauley Rowe (d. 1977), the last surviving native speakers of Kansa.

Kansa is a SOV language[10] and the verbs are inflected based on the person and number of their subjects and objects.

[8] The 2nd Annual Dhegiha Gathering in 2012 brought Kansa, Quapaw, Osage, Omaha and Ponca speakers together to share best practices in language revitalization.