The Plains Apache language (or Kiowa Apache) is a Southern Athabaskan language spoken by the Plains Apache peoples living primarily in central Oklahoma.
Plains Apache is most closely related to other Southern Athabaskan languages like Navajo, Chiricahua Apache, Mescalero Apache, Lipan Apache, Western Apache, and Jicarilla Apache. Plains Apache is the most divergent member of the subfamily. These speakers probably left their northern homeland later than the other Southern Athabaskan peoples. The language is extremely endangered with perhaps only one or two native speaking elders. Alfred Chalepah, Jr., who might have been the last native speaker, died in 2008.
Famous quotes containing the words plains, apache and/or language:
“The Plains are not forgiving. Anything that is shallow—the easy optimism of a homesteader; the false hope that denies geography, climate, history; the tree whose roots don’t reach ground water—will dry up and blow away.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“The Apache have a legend that the coyote brought them fire and that the bear in his hibernations communes with the spirits of the “overworld” and later imparts the wisdom gained thereby to the medicine men.”
—Administration in the State of Arizona, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be “revolutionary” but not transformative.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)