# Lakota language
**Lakota** (Lakȟótiyapi, also rendered Lakhóta or Teton) is a Siouan language of the [Great Plains](https://www.edgepedia.org/great-plains), spoken by the [Lakota people](https://www.edgepedia.org/lakota-people) and forming, together with Dakota, the Dakotan dialect continuum historically called Sioux. It is mutually intelligible with Dakota, and the two are distinguished above all by a single consonant correspondence: where Dakota has d and Nakota has n, Lakota has l, reflecting the reflex of Proto-Siouan *r.[1](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED218015.pdf) The language is critically endangered; recent estimates cited in a 2025 federal grant application indicate fewer than 1,000 fluent speakers remain, most of them over 65 years old.[2](https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/AwardDetail?arg_AwardNum=90NL0723&arg_ProgOfficeCode=169)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Native name | Lakȟótiyapi; variants Lakȟól'iyapi, Lakȟóta iyápi[3](https://lakhota.org/downloads/pdf/NLD-sample.pdf) |
| Family | Siouan (Dakotan); mutually intelligible with Dakota[4](https://home.uchicago.edu/~vfriedm/Articles/193Friedman06.pdf) |
| Defining sound change | l where Dakota has d and Nakota has n (reflex of Proto-Siouan *r)[1](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED218015.pdf) |
| Vowel inventory | Five oral and three nasal vowels, shared with all other Dakotan varieties[5](https://home.uni-leipzig.de/muellerg/igra2/publikationen/Paschen2017.pdf) |
| Typology | Head-marking, stative-active (split-intransitive) alignment, mildly synthetic and partially agglutinative morphology[6](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/stul.70008) |
| Speaker estimates | 6,000–20,000 (2006); 2,300 L1 speakers of all Sioux dialects (2016, Lakota Language Consortium); fewer than 1,000 fluent (2025 grant estimate)[4](https://home.uchicago.edu/~vfriedm/Articles/193Friedman06.pdf) • [7](https://elcat.colo.hawaii.edu/lang/6512?hl=en) • [2](https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/AwardDetail?arg_AwardNum=90NL0723&arg_ProgOfficeCode=169) |
| Reference dictionary | New Lakota Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1,100 pages, Lakota Language Consortium, 2008[8](https://books.google.com/books/about/New_lakota_dictionary.html?hl=en&id=1RAqAQAAIAAJ) |
## Classification and dialects
Lakota is one of a group of closely related varieties that linguists call Dakotan. In the traditional three-way grouping, Lakota is spoken in the west (the Teton bands), Dakota in the east (the Santee), and Nakota in the north, with Nakoda ([Assiniboine](https://www.edgepedia.org/assiniboine) and Stoney) in the northwest; speakers of Lakota and Dakota were traditionally referred to in English as the Sioux.[4](https://home.uchicago.edu/~vfriedm/Articles/193Friedman06.pdf) The New Lakota Dictionary treats Lakota and Dakota together and divides Dakota into Eastern Dakota (Santee-Sisseton) and Western Dakota (Yankton-Yanktonai), while listing Assiniboine and Stoney separately as Nakoda.[5](https://home.uni-leipzig.de/muellerg/igra2/publikationen/Paschen2017.pdf)
The dialect labels have shifted over time. Shaw (1980) classified Yankton as Nakota alongside Stoney and Assiniboine, but the New Lakota Dictionary argues from Yankton's central position in the Dakota-Lakota dialect continuum and its regular sound correspondences with Santee-Sisseton that Yankton-Yanktonai belong to the Dakota group instead.[5](https://home.uni-leipzig.de/muellerg/igra2/publikationen/Paschen2017.pdf) Within Lakota itself, minor differences exist between the southern and northern reservations, mostly concerning vocabulary.[9](https://repositorio.uam.es/bitstreams/7747c419-dac7-43bd-93f3-2941ed123019/download)
## Phonology and grammar
The vowel system comprises five oral vowels (i, e, a, o, u) and three nasal vowels (ĩ, ũ, ã), a property shared with all other varieties of Dakotan and typical of many other members of the Siouan family.[5](https://home.uni-leipzig.de/muellerg/igra2/publikationen/Paschen2017.pdf)
**Grammar.** Lakota is a head-marking language: it lacks case-marking, and grammatical relations are expressed by agreement on the verb. Its morphology is mildly synthetic and partially agglutinative, and it follows a stative-active (split-intransitive) alignment, meaning the subject of an intransitive verb is cross-referenced sometimes like a transitive subject and sometimes like a direct object, depending on semantic criteria.[6](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/stul.70008) Verbs fall into two main classes, stative and active, each with its own set of bound person affixes; the third person singular is marked with a zero affix in both series, a fact that has drawn sustained scholarly attention because first and second person markers are overt.[6](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/stul.70008) Major word classes are noun, verb, adverb, postposition, demonstrative, pronoun, and conjunction; the verb can be regarded as polysynthetic, and noun incorporation occurs, while functions often covered by adjectives elsewhere are handled by stative verbs and adverbs.[4](https://home.uchicago.edu/~vfriedm/Articles/193Friedman06.pdf)
## Orthography and lexicography
The Sioux had a pictographic writing system before European contact, but from the early nineteenth century, under the influence of Christian missionaries, a series of alphabetic orthographies was developed.[9](https://repositorio.uam.es/bitstreams/7747c419-dac7-43bd-93f3-2941ed123019/download) Missionaries studied the language in Minnesota Territory and [Dakota Territory](https://www.edgepedia.org/dakota-territory) as a prerequisite to mission work in the early 1800s.[10](https://www.sicc.sk.ca/nakoda) A chronological sequence of orthographies runs from Stephen Return Riggs's Bible translation of 1834 and his 1852 grammar and dictionary, through Boas and Swanton with Ella Deloria (1910/1932) and Eugene Buechel's Bible (1924) and grammar (1939), to later systems including White Hat's (1973/1999) and [Jan Ullrich](https://www.edgepedia.org/jan-ullrich)'s (1992); earlier systems were not fully phonemic, while several later ones, including Ullrich's, are.[11](https://www.languagegeek.com/siouan/Orthogs.html) Buechel's *A Grammar of Lakota* (1939) and the Boas-Deloria *Dakota Grammar* (1941), which despite its title concerns the Lakota dialect, have been influential descriptions of the language.[12](https://rrg.caset.buffalo.edu/rrg/Ullrich.pdf)
Two dictionaries anchor modern Lakota lexicography. Buechel's classic dictionary, in a new comprehensive edition edited with Paul Manhart and published in 2002, contains over thirty thousand entries in Lakota-English and English-Lakota sections.[13](https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska-paperback/9780803261990/lakota-dictionary/) The New Lakota Dictionary (Lakota Language Consortium, 2008), the product of 25 years of linguistic work with over 300 speakers, incorporates the Yankton-Yanktonai and Santee-Sisseton Dakota dialects and includes a grammar section covering phonology, verbs, nouns, syntax, and language change.[8](https://books.google.com/books/about/New_lakota_dictionary.html?hl=en&id=1RAqAQAAIAAJ) The dictionary's own entries give the language's native name as Lakȟól'iyapi or Lakȟótiyapi, literally "the Lakota language."[3](https://lakhota.org/downloads/pdf/NLD-sample.pdf)
The orthography used in current teaching materials marks each meaningful sound with a distinct symbol: nasal vowels and aspirated stops are written with letters rather than diacritics, aspirated stops are distinguished from plain stops by h and ȟ (so tó "yes" contrasts with thó "blue"), and stress is marked consistently, as in eyáya "he kept saying" versus éyaya "he took it away."[14](https://lakhota.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Level-1-Teachers-Guide.pdf) Albert White Hat's *Reading and Writing the Lakota Language*, the first Lakota grammar written by a native speaker, presents the Sicangu dialect using an orthography developed by Lakota speakers in 1982 that is supplanting older systems provided by linguists and missionaries.[15](https://uofupress.com/books/reading-and-writing-lakota-language/)
## Vitality and revitalization
Estimates of the speaker population differ by source and date. The *Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics* reported 6,000 to 20,000 speakers in 2006, with considerable partial or receptive knowledge likely.[4](https://home.uchicago.edu/~vfriedm/Articles/193Friedman06.pdf) The Endangered Languages Project, citing the Lakota Language Consortium in 2016, counted 2,300 L1 speakers of all Sioux dialects in a total population of 175,000, and classified the language as endangered.[7](https://elcat.colo.hawaii.edu/lang/6512?hl=en) The 2025 federal grant estimate of fewer than 1,000 fluent speakers, most over 65, marks the steepest of these figures.[2](https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/AwardDetail?arg_AwardNum=90NL0723&arg_ProgOfficeCode=169)
**Institutional responses.** The Lakota Language Consortium, a Native-led nonprofit established in 2004, develops educational materials, technology, and learning opportunities for speakers and learners of all ages.[16](https://lakhota.org/our-mission/) • [17](https://www.lakhota.org/downloads/pdf/NIEASummerIssue2009b18.pdf) Its digital tools include the New Lakota Dictionary app, the Owóksape learning app, and the Lakota Vocab Builder, alongside free audio courses.[18](https://lakhota.org/digital-resources/) At Oglala Lakota College, a federally funded Lakota Language Education and Resource Development Project (award 90NL0723, $747,142 for fiscal year 2025) is producing an updated college-level textbook, a new Lakota-English dictionary of 3,000 to 5,000 words with audio recordings from fluent speakers, and a Master-Apprentice Program pairing fluent speakers with advanced learners for at least six hours of immersive use per week over a 15-week semester.[2](https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/AwardDetail?arg_AwardNum=90NL0723&arg_ProgOfficeCode=169) Immersion education also runs through school programs: Little Wound School's federally funded project pairs adult Lakota-fluent speakers with students from Lakota-speaking homes for three hours of daily immersion instruction, monthly immersion meals, and a week-long summer retreat.[19](https://www.ed.gov/grants-and-programs/grants-special-populations/grants-native-americans-alaskan-natives-and-pacific-islanders/native-american-language-grant-naled) Sitting Bull College hosted the first Lakota Summer Institute in 2007 and began a collegiate teacher-preparation program, the Lakota Language Education Action Program, in 2010.[20](https://tribalcollegejournal.org/turning-a-corner-in-language-revitalization-sitting-bull-colleges-lakota-language-capacity-building-initiative/)
## Computational resources
Lakota's low-resource status has drawn recent computational work. LakotaBERT, introduced in 2025, is described as the first large language model tailored for Lakota; its authors compiled a corpus of 105,000 sentences in Lakota, English, and parallel texts from books and websites to support revitalization.[21](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18212) In 2026, a benchmark tested seven large language models, of which four were proprietary and three were open-weight, at translating between Lakota and English in both directions, drawing on 200 pairs of sentences taken from the New Lakota Dictionary. The best model, [Gemini 3](https://www.edgepedia.org/gemini-3).1 Pro, achieved a mean chrF++ of 59.4 on Lakota-to-English and 42.6 on English-to-Lakota, and the study concluded that no model produces reliable translation in either direction; semantic-equivalence judgments by two independent LLM judges (Cohen's κ = 0.75) ranged from 6 percent (GPT-5.2) to 60 percent (Gemini), and diacritic analysis showed models place diacritical marks inconsistently even when base characters are roughly correct.[22](https://aclanthology.org/2026.americasnlp-6.2/) These results quantify how far machine translation remains from the fluency that immersion programs and speaker-apprentice pairs are working to sustain.
## References
1. [One of the differences between Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota is in the shift from *L to N to D, ERIC ED218015](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED218015.pdf)
2. [The Lakota Language Education and Resource Development Project, Award 90NL0723, HHS TAGGS](https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/AwardDetail?arg_AwardNum=90NL0723&arg_ProgOfficeCode=169)
3. [New Lakota Dictionary sample entries, Lakota Language Consortium](https://lakhota.org/downloads/pdf/NLD-sample.pdf)
4. [Victor Friedman, "Lakota," Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 6, pp. 303–305](https://home.uchicago.edu/~vfriedm/Articles/193Friedman06.pdf)
5. [Paschen (2017), "4.1 Lakota," chapter on underapplication, University of Leipzig](https://home.uni-leipzig.de/muellerg/igra2/publikationen/Paschen2017.pdf)
6. [Avelino Corral Esteban, "New Insights Into Lakota Syntax," Studia Linguistica (2025)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/stul.70008)
7. [Sioux, Endangered Languages Project (2016 Lakota Language Consortium figures)](https://elcat.colo.hawaii.edu/lang/6512?hl=en)
8. [New Lakota Dictionary, 2nd edn, Lakota Language Consortium, 2008, Google Books](https://books.google.com/books/about/New_lakota_dictionary.html?hl=en&id=1RAqAQAAIAAJ)
9. [A Linguistic Comparison of Sioux Orthographic Systems, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid repository](https://repositorio.uam.es/bitstreams/7747c419-dac7-43bd-93f3-2941ed123019/download)
10. [Early Study of the Dakota, Nakoda, Lakota Language, Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre](https://www.sicc.sk.ca/nakoda)
11. [Orthographies used for Lakota language, languagegeek.com](https://www.languagegeek.com/siouan/Orthogs.html)
12. [Jan F. Ullrich, dissertation on Lakota, University at Buffalo](https://rrg.caset.buffalo.edu/rrg/Ullrich.pdf)
13. [Lakota Dictionary: Lakota-English / English-Lakota, New Comprehensive Edition, University of Nebraska Press](https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska-paperback/9780803261990/lakota-dictionary/)
14. [Lakȟótiya Wóglaka Po! Level 1 Teacher's Guide, Lakota Language Consortium](https://lakhota.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Level-1-Teachers-Guide.pdf)
15. [Reading and Writing the Lakota Language, University of Utah Press](https://uofupress.com/books/reading-and-writing-lakota-language/)
16. [Our Mission, Lakota Language Consortium](https://lakhota.org/our-mission/)
17. [NIEA Summer Issue 2009, Lakota Language Consortium (2004 founding of Lakȟól'iyapi Okȟólakičhiye)](https://www.lakhota.org/downloads/pdf/NIEASummerIssue2009b18.pdf)
18. [Apps & Downloads, Lakota Language Consortium](https://lakhota.org/digital-resources/)
19. [Native American Language Grant (NAL@ED), U.S. Department of Education](https://www.ed.gov/grants-and-programs/grants-special-populations/grants-native-americans-alaskan-natives-and-pacific-islanders/native-american-language-grant-naled)
20. [Turning A Corner in Language Revitalization: Sitting Bull College's Lakota Language Capacity Building Initiative, Tribal College Journal](https://tribalcollegejournal.org/turning-a-corner-in-language-revitalization-sitting-bull-colleges-lakota-language-capacity-building-initiative/)
21. [LakotaBERT: A Transformer-based Model for Low Resource Lakota Language, arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18212)
22. [Lance Robertson, "Evaluating Frontier LLM Translation Capability for Lakota," AmericasNLP 2026, ACL Anthology](https://aclanthology.org/2026.americasnlp-6.2/)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Languages and dialects › Named languages by region › Languages of the Americas*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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