I recently came across the response to someone who had inquired about the validity of the Native American stereotypical greeting “How!”, and I am afraid Cecil’s response was careless in at least one way.
In the column, Cecil refers to “Siouan” as a major language. That is not quite correct. Generally, languages are grouped together by their degree of relatedness. Supergroups of languages of the same type are known as “phyla” or sometimes “language families” (the use of these two terms is not always consistent).
Anyway, in 1929 Edward Sapir developed such a classification for Native American languages. According to Sapir (not everyone agrees), Souian is a language family under the Hokan-Siouan phylum and not a seperate language at all. Sapir’s Hokan-Siouan includes languages such as Karok, Pomo, Washo, Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Caddo, Pawnee, Arikara, Dakota/Lakota/Nakota,
Crow, Osage, Quapaw, Winnebago, Mandan, Hidatsa, Mohave, Yuma, and many more. However, there is no Siouan language, major or minor, only a Siouan family (and some authorities even dispute that). However, no one postulates a Siouan language.
On a related note, most scholars (but not all) agree that there are more phyla and language families in North America than there are in Europe, which should forever lay to rest the misconception that there is such thing as an “Indian” language.
Carsten Schmidtke, Oklahoma State University