Lakota/Midterm Overview

Quick Facts

• Where it’s spoken: North and South Dakota
• Size of the community that uses it: approx. 5000
• Any prominent languages it might be related to: other varieties of Sioux, Dakota
• Orthography: Suggested Lakota Orthography (SLO)
• ISO: lkt

Morphology

• Primarily agglutinative
• S-O-V order
• Postpositional
• Possible for a grammatically correct sentence to exist with only a verb
• Men and women’s speech differ through the use of eight enclitics
• There are two paradigms for verb inflection: (1) set of morphemes indicates the person and number of the subject of active verbs and (2) set of morphemes agrees with the object of transitive action verbs or the subject of stative verbs.

Challenges

• The orthography was inconsistent across and even within corpora, so we had trouble standardising our keyboard and developing a corpus for testing
• The agglutinative morphology of the language made grammar analysis difficult, and in building our morphological analyser we found it difficult to isolate parts of speech and matching inputs to outputs