Talk:Osage language

Prevalence
I'm fairly certain the source cited (Quintero, Carolyn) is factually incorrect, given I know several fluent Osage speakers, none of whom are over 75. While this may have once been true, it doesn't seem to be currently the case based on my exposure. I'd hazard to guess there's more Osage speakers than Spanish speakers in the Tulsa area. I'd be curious if a serious census were taken of the Osage Nation what the results would be. Baloo (talk) 19:20, 18 April 2011 (UTC)


 * A revived language as of 2014? There are over 15,000 self-identified Osage people (13,500 belong to the Osage tribe). Probably a thousand Osage may know bits of the language, but the language extinction shown the last native-born speaker before learning English (reportedly Osages born since 1940 are English-dominant). Even extinct Native American Languages may return by a few tribal language immersion programs in place, but it takes the will of the given people's desire to restore a language and give it credence to tribal identity. 71.102.1.95 (talk) 14:14, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Dash size
After trying to link Kansa-Osage on this and the Kansa language several times, I realized that there was a difference in the dash/hyphen size between the word listed and the article. The article was created on the Topeka, Kansas page, and thus was written with a hyphen as opposed to the dash. I have no idea whether this is important or not to the spelling of the language group. Please change it if necessary. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Artheartsoul1 (talk • contribs) 02:08, 22 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Both should link, but that stub doesn't have enough info to be worth an article. Redirecting to the family page.  — kwami (talk) 02:22, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
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Clean-up proposal
This article needs to be fixed up a little bit for the sake of clarity, especially in the phonology section. I don't study this language, but I'm able to read articles about other languages I don't study while still managing to understand what the article is telling me. Articles should not be so ambiguous or nebulous if one knows enough technical jargon. Nevertheless, much of the article is quite confusing. Examples: The list of vowel clusters are grouped with the list of long vowels, but they do not appear in the later list of diphthongs. Does that mean the clusters are not true diphthongs, and that there is actually some kind of hiatus between them? This isn't clarified at all. Another example is that the glottal stop bullet point states that "the glottal stop [ʔ] appears in clusters only after p, c, and k, and it is not considered a true consonant of Osage." Reading this, I interpreted this sentence as saying the glottal stop only ever appears in those clusters, which is *why* it's not considered a true consonant of Osage. But then the next sentence seemingly undercuts this by saying "It is best thought of as a phonetic device used occasionally at utterance level, and it is typically to separate vowels that would otherwise contract." So, does all of this mean it isn't considered a "true consonant" orthographically? Was the first sentence indicating—in a roundabout way—that these /p/, /c/, and /k/ clusters with /ʔ/ were actually just ejective consonants? Why also imply initially that it can only occur in those clusters, before later stating it can also occur to prevent contraction between adjacent vowels? This bullet point is too obfuscatory. Finally, the status of /r/ is very unclear: The consonant table places it in parentheses, indicating it's marginal, dialectal, or just an allophone. But this isn't specified directly. The only elaborations on /r/ occur are thus: The pronunciation of the /br/ cluster having some dialectal variation; that /r/ is an allophone of /ð/ "in some instances," without clarifying hose instances beyond the examples given, all of which are apparently just the /br/ cluster; that /ð/, /n/, and /r/ all derive from historic *r, and that /br/ apparently came mostly from *bð. All of this, taken together, tells me that /r/ only ever occurs in /br/, but that's never once simply stated—after all, /b/ is simply stated to only ever occur in /br/. The way that /r/ is written about in the article makes me doubt that it only ever appears in /br/.

Now, again, I don't study or know much about Osage, so I can't really confirm these doubts. I'd very much appreciate it if someone who knows better were to clear up these ambiguities. AnyGuy (talk) 22:22, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Adding the Grammar
I found a document that could be useful to flesh out the language's grammar:

https://grammar2021.sciencesconf.org/364297/document Kaden Bayne Vanciel (talk) 16:05, 7 September 2023 (UTC)