[3] However, when the language was threatened and the number of speakers decreased, dialect differences largely disappeared.

[8] Wichita is a member of the Caddoan language family, along with modern Caddo, Pawnee, Arikara, and Kitsai.

Though neither Rood nor Garvin include nasals in their respective consonant charts for Wichita, Rood's later inclusion of nasals in phonetic transcription for his 2008 paper ("Some Wichita Recollections: Aspects of Culture Reflected in Language") support the appearance of at least /n/.

Though Rood employs the letter ⟨o⟩ in his transcriptions,[3] Garvin instead uses ⟨u⟩, and asserts that /u/ is a separate phoneme.

Taylor uses Garvin's transcription in his analysis, but theorizes a shift of *u to /i/ medially in Wichita, but does not have enough examples to fully analyze all the possible environments.

For example, /awa/ is frequently contracted to [óː] (the high tone is an effect of the elided consonant).

Rood proposes that there is a three-way contrast, which is quite rare among the world's languages, although well attested for Mixe, and probably present in Estonian.

[7] Under Rood's analysis, then, Wichita has 9 phonemic vowels:[7] There is also a contrastive high tone, indicated here by an acute accent.

Linguist David S. Rood, who has written many papers concerning the Wichita language, recorded this example, as spoken by Bertha Provost (a native speaker, now deceased) in the late 1960s.

This leads one to conclude Wichita has a largely free word-order, where parts of the sentence do not need to be located next to each other to be related.

Another means of expressing instrument, used only for body parts, is a characteristic position of incorporation in the verb complex.

Here are some examples: Most nouns take a locative suffix kiyah: ika:ʔarock-kiyahLOCika:ʔa -kiyahrock LOC'where the rock is'But a few take the verbal -hirih: hir-ahrʔaground-hirihLOChir-ahrʔa -hirihground LOC'on the ground'Any verbal participle (i.e. any sentence) can be converted to a locative clause by the suffix -hirih Wichita is a polysynthetic language.

Almost all the information in any simple sentence is expressed by means of bound morphemes in the verb complex.

A typical sentence from a story is the following:[11] wa:cʔarʔasquirrel  kiya+QUOTa...ki+AORa+PVBRiwa:c+big (quantity)ʔaras+meatRa+COLri+PORTkita+topʔa+comehi:riks+REPsIPFV  na+PTCPya:k+woodr+COLwi+be uprighthrihLOCwa:cʔarʔa {} kiya+ a...ki+ a+ Riwa:c+ ʔaras+ Ra+ ri+ kita+ ʔa+ hi:riks+ s {} na+ ya:k+ r+ wi+ hrihsquirrel {} QUOT AOR PVB {big (quantity)} meat COL PORT top come REP IPFV {} PTCP wood COL {be upright} LOC'The squirrel, by making many trips, carried the large quantity of meat up into the top of the tree, they say.

The verb, in addition to the verbal units of quotative, aorist, repetitive, and imperfective, also contain morphemes that indicate the agent is singular, the patient is collective, the direction of the action is to the top, and all the lexical information about the whole patient noun phrase, "big quantity of meat."

Possession of a noun can be expressed by incorporating that noun in this verb and indicating the person of the possessor by the subject pronoun:[12][13] na-PTCPt-1.SBJuR-POSSʔak-wifeʔi-behSUBORDna- t- uR- ʔak- ʔi- hPTCP 1.SBJ POSS wife be SUBORD'my wife'niye:schildna-PTCPt-1.SBJ-uR-POSSʔiki-be.PLhSUBORDniye:s na- t- uR- ʔiki- hchild PTCP 1.SBJ- POSS be.PL SUBORD'my children'Nouns can be divided into those that are countable and those that are not.

In particular, with some verbs, animate nouns (including first and second person pronouns) require special treatment when they are patients in the sentence.

Countable nouns that are neither animate nor activities, such as chairs, apples, rocks, or body parts, do not require any semantic class agreement morphemes in the surface grammar of Wichita.

Examples include: A surface structure object in the non-third-person category can be clearly marked as singular, dual, or plural.

[14] The last native speaker of the Wichita language, Doris Jean Lamar McLemore, died in 2016.

The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes offered language classes, taught by Doris McLemore and Shirley Davilla.

Linguist David Rood has collaborated with Wichita speakers to create a dictionary and language CDs.