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Mandan (endonym: Nų́ų́ʔetaa íroo) is an extinct Siouan language of North Dakota in the United States.
Mandan is taught at Fort Berthold Community College along with the Hidatsa language and . Linguist Mauricio Mixco of the University of Utah has been involved in fieldwork with remaining speakers since 1993. As of 2007, extensive materials in the Mandan language at the college and at the North Dakota Heritage Center, in Bismarck, North Dakota, remained to be processed, according to linguists.
The MHA Language Project has created language learning materials for Mandan, including a vocabulary app, a dictionary, and several books in the language. They also provide a summer learning institute and materials for teachers.
Mandan has two main : Nuptare and Nuetare.
Only the Nuptare variety survived into the 20th century, and all speakers were bilingual in Hidatsa. In 1999, there were only six fluent speakers of Mandan still alive.Personal communication from Mauricio Mixco in 1999, reported in Edwin Benson, the last surviving fluent Mandan speaker, died in 2016.
The language received much attention from White Americans because of the supposedly lighter skin color of the Mandan people, which they speculated was due to an ultimate European origin. In the 1830s Prince Maximilian of Wied spent more time recording Mandan over all other Siouan languages and prepared a comparison list of Mandan and Welsh language words (he thought that the Mandan might be displaced Welsh). The idea of a Mandan/Welsh connection was also supported by George Catlin.
Will and Spinden report that the medicine men had their own secret language.
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and become and before nasal vowels, and is realized as word-initially.
Mandan has a system of allocutive agreement and so different grammatical forms may be used that depend on the gender of the addressee. Questions asked of men must use the suffix -oʔsha: the suffix -oʔną is used to ask of women. Likewise, the indicative suffix is -oʔsh to address men, -oʔre to address women. The same goes for the Imperative mood: -ta (male), -ną (female)., cited in
Mandan verbs include a set of postural verbs, which encode the shapes of the subject of the verb:
The English translations are not "A pot was sitting there," "A big village stood there," or "The river lay there." That reflects the fact that the postural categorization is required in such Mandan locative statements.
Compare the similar examples in Lakhota.
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