History
Wichita is a member of the Caddoan language family, along with modern Caddo, Pawnee, Arikara, and Kitsai. When the Europeans began to settle North America, Wichita separated into three dialects; Waco, Towakoni, and KirikirÉi:s (aka, Wichita Proper). However, when the language was threatened and the number of speakers decreased, dialect differences largely disappeared While at present there is one living native speaker, as late as 2007 there were three living native speakers. This is a sharp decline from the 500 speakers estimated by Paul L. Garvin in 1950.
Read more about this topic: Wichita Language
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)