Kiowa Language - Orthography

Orthography

Kiowa orthography was developed by native speaker Parker McKenzie, who had worked with J. P. Harrington and later with other linguists. The development of the orthography is detailed in Meadows & McKenzie (2001). The tables below show each orthographic symbol used in the Kiowa writing system and its corresponding phonetic value (written IPA).

Vowels

Orthography	Pronunciation		Orthography	Pronunciation
a	a		ai	aj
au	ɔ		aui	ɔj
e	e
i	i
o	o		oi	oj
u	u		ui	uj

The mid-back vowel /ɔ/ is indicated by a digraph vowel au. The four diphthongs indicate the offglide /j/ with the symbol i following the main vowel. Nasal vowels are indicated by underlining the vowel symbol: nasal o is thus o̲. Long vowels are indicated with macron diacritics: long o is thus ō. Short vowels are unmarked. Tone is indicated with diacritics. The acute accent ´ represents high tone, the grave accent ` indicates low tone, and the circumflex ˆ indicates falling tone — these are exemplied on the vowel o as ó (high), ò (low), ô (falling). Since long vowels also have tones, the vowel symbols can have both a macron and a tone diacritic above the macron: ṓ (long high), ṑ (long low), ō̂ (long falling).

Consonants

Orthography	Pronunciation		Orthography	Pronunciation
b	b		ch	ts
f	p		x	tsʼ
p	pʰ		s	s
v	pʼ		z	z
d	d		l	l
j	t		y	j
t	tʰ		w	w
th	tʼ		h	h
g	ɡ		m	m
c	k		n	n
k	kʰ
q	kʼ

The palatal glide that is pronounced after velar consonants g, c, k, q (which are phonetically /ɡ, k, kʰ, kʼ/, respectively) is never written (as it is predictable). There are, however, a few exceptions where g is not followed by a glide, in which case an apostrophe ’ is written after the g as g’. Thus, there is, for example, ga which is pronounced and g’a which is pronounced . The glottal stop /ʔ/ is also never written as it is often deleted and its presence is predictable. A final convention is that pronominal prefixes are always written as separate words instead of being attached to verbs.

Like sub-continent Indian scripts (e.g. Devanagari), the Kiowa alphabet is ordered according to mostly phonetic principles. The Kiowa alphabetical order is shown in the tables above, vowels first, then consonants, reading down the columns, left column then right.