Although Kiowa is most closely related to the other Tanoan languages of the Pueblos, the earliest historic location of its speakers is western Montana around 1700.

Prior to the historic record, oral histories, archaeology, and linguistics suggest that pre-Kiowa was the northernmost dialect of Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan, spoken at Late Basketmaker II Era sites.

Around AD 450, they migrated northward through the territory of the Ancestral Puebloans and Great Basin, occupying the eastern Fremont culture region of the Colorado Plateau until sometime before 1300.

Speakers then drifted northward to the northwestern Plains, arriving no later than the mid-16th century in the Yellowstone area where the Kiowa were first encountered by Europeans.

The Kiowa then later migrated to the Black Hills and the southern Plains, where the language was recorded in historic times.

[2] Colorado College anthropologist Laurel Watkins noted in 1984 based on Parker McKenzie's estimates that only about 400 people (mostly over the age of 50) could speak Kiowa and that only rarely were children learning the language.

A more recent figure from McKenzie is 300 adult speakers of "varying degrees of fluency" reported by Mithun (1999) out of a 12,242 Kiowa tribal membership (US Census 2000).

The Intertribal Wordpath Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving native languages of Oklahoma, estimates the maximum number of fluent Kiowa speakers as of 2006 to be 400.

[5][failed verification][dead link‍] Starting in the 2010s, the Kiowa Tribe offered weekly language classes at the Jacobson House, a nonprofit Native American art center in Norman, Oklahoma.

Dane Poolaw and Carol Williams taught the language using Parker McKenzie's method.

One Kiowa alphabet was developed by native speaker Parker McKenzie,[10] who had worked with J. P. Harrington and later with other linguists.

However, McKenzie's use of letters such as ⟨f⟩, ⟨v⟩, ⟨j⟩, ⟨x⟩ to represent consonant sounds different from their English values was not universally adopted.

[citation needed] The tables below show the letters of the current Kiowa alphabet with their corresponding phonetic values (written in the IPA).

[15]) The spelling of the voiceless unaspirated plosives and affricates (plain and ejective) varies between different systems: Velar plosive phonemes /ɡ, k, kʰ, kʼ/ are regularly palatalized [ɡʲ, kʲ, kʰʲ, kʼʲ] before the vowel phoneme /a/.

This glide is written in Harrington's vocabulary, but is omitted in McKenzie's writing system (which instead uses the apostrophe ⟨’⟩ after the consonant letter to mark the rare cases, found in loanwords, where unpalatalized velars occur before /a/, e.g.

A final convention is that pronominal prefixes are written as separate words instead of being attached to verbs.

A participant is primary in the following cases: The term non-agent here refers to semantic roles including involitional agents, patients, beneficiaries, recipients, experiencers, and possessors.