However, efforts to develop a written form of Lakota began, primarily through the work of Christian missionaries and linguists, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
One significant figure in the development of a written form of Lakota was Ella Cara Deloria, also called Aŋpétu Wašté Wiŋ (Beautiful Day Woman), a Yankton Dakota ethnologist, linguist, and novelist who worked extensively with the Dakota and Lakota peoples, documenting their languages and cultures.
She collaborated with linguists such as Franz Boas and Edward Sapir to create written materials for Lakota, including dictionaries and grammars.
[3] His work focused on the Sicangu dialect using an orthography developed by Lakota in 1982 and which today is slowly supplanting older systems provided by linguists and missionaries.
The print alongside its Dakota counterpart Iapi Oaye ("The Word Carrier") played an important role in documenting the enlistment and affairs including obituaries of Native Sioux soldiers into the army as America became involved in World War I.
The voiceless aspirated plosives have two allophonic variants each: those with a delay in voicing ([pʰ tʰ kʰ]), and those with velar friction ([pˣ tˣ kˣ]), which occur before /a/, /ã/, /o/, /ĩ/, and /ũ/ (thus, lakhóta, /laˈkʰota/ is phonetically [laˈkˣota]).
A common phonological process which occurs in rapid speech is vowel contraction, which generally results from the loss of an intervocalic glide.
[9] Lakota also exhibits some traces of sound symbolism among fricatives, where the point of articulation changes to reflect intensity: zí, "it's yellow", ží, "it's tawny", ǧí, "it's brown".
Several orthographies as well as ad hoc spelling are used to write the Lakota language, with varying perspectives on whether standardization should be implemented.
[15] Sinte Gleska uses the orthography developed by Albert White Hat,[16] which on December 13, 2012, was formally adopted by the Rosebud Sioux Tribe per Tribal Resolution No.
A language is a living thing and students need to breathe life into it daily; talking with friends, family and elders in Lakota".
[23] On May 3, 2022, the Tribal Council of the Standing Rock Sioux, in a near-unanimous vote, banished the Lakota Language Consortium (and specifically, LLC linguist Jan Ullrich and co-founder Wilhelm Meya) from ever again setting foot on the reservation.
To the non-Lakota speaker, the postpositions él and ektá sound like they can be interchangeable, but although they are full synonyms of each other, they are used in different occasions.
(Pustet 2013) A pointer for when to use él and when to use ektá can be determined by the concepts of location (motionless) or motion; and space vs. time.
Lakota has a number of enclitic particles which follow the verb, many of which differ depending on whether the speaker is male or female.
[9] Assimilating Indigenous peoples into the expanding American society of the late 19th and early 20th centuries depended on suppression or full eradication of each tribe's unique language as the central aspect of its culture.
Indian residential schools in the US and Canada that separated Indigenous children from their parents and relatives enforced this assimilation process with beatings and other forms of violence for speaking tribal languages(Powers).
"Lakota persisted through the recognized natural immersion afforded by daily conversation in the home, the community at reservation-wide events, even in texts written in the form of letters to family and friends.
[5] In 1967, the Red Cloud Indian School at Pine Ridge began offering Lakota language classes.
A few years later Black Bear was replaced as a chair of the department by Albert White Hat, who discontinued the use of the Colorado University textbooks.
Rosebud Cultural Studies teacher Randy Emery spoke to the Lakota Journal, stating, "The Lakota Language Consortium has created the misleading impression that Sinte Gleska University is one of the schools that supports their organization," and that the LLC had circulated a document to this effect with other misleading information about the state of the language, "The (LLC) documentation strongly implies that there are no fluent speakers younger than the elder age group and the presentation implies that the Lakota cannot deal with the problem themselves; therefore outside help must be brought in to lead the program.
[15] In 2008, the Red Cloud School at Pine Ridge launched their Lakota language curriculum for K–12 students.
[35] On May 3, 2022, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council passed Resolution Number 150-22, which, along with banishing the LLC, contains provisions to protect the Nation's intellectual property rights and data sovereignty.
[24][25] It reclaimed copyrights over all language materials created by the consortium and called for their immediate return, to be placed in the care of "the first-language speakers and knowledge-keepers in our communities.
LLEAP is a four-year program designed to create at least 30 new Lakota language teachers by 2014, and was funded by $2.4 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Education.
At the end of the initial phase, SBC and USD will permanently offer the Lakota Language Teaching and Learning degree as part of their regular undergraduate Education curriculum.
LLEAP is the first program of its kind, offering courses to create effective teachers in order to save a Native American language from going extinct, and potentially educate the 120,000 prospective Lakota speakers in the 21st century.
This law, which took effect on October 30, 1990, reversed over 200 years of American policy that would have otherwise eliminated the indigenous languages of the United States.
Here is a collection of selected resources currently available: Additional print and electronic materials have been created by the immersion program on Pine Ridge.
[examples needed] Just as people from different regions of countries have accents, Lakota who speak English have some distinct speech patterns.