Lakota dictionary
Words of the prairie
Lakȟótiyapi, the language of the Lakota, is spoken on the prairies of South and North Dakota, around Ȟe Sápa, the Black Hills. It belongs to the Siouan language family, together with Dakota and Nakota, the siblings of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires. It is the language of prayer and song, and in it every prayer ends with Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ – all my relatives.
Here you will find a core vocabulary and a selection of words from ceremony and prayer, sacred beings, animals and plants, the sky, the four directions and the moons, the Lakota values and everyday greetings. You can search in both directions, in Lakota or in your own language, even without special characters: «tatanka» finds tȟatȟáŋka. Click a word to see its meaning in the other languages and its source.
About the spelling
All words follow today’s standard orthography of the Lakota Language Consortium, as used in the New Lakota Dictionary and in schools. Older spellings, such as Eugene Buechel’s, are shown with each word under the spelling variants.
č sounds like ch in «church», š like sh and ž like the s in «measure». ȟ is like ch in Scottish «loch», ǧ its soft, gargled sibling. An ŋ after a vowel shows that the vowel is nasal: aŋ, iŋ, uŋ. An h after p, t, k or č marks aspiration (th as in «tea»), a ȟ there a rough, raspy release (kȟ like k and loch-ch together). The apostrophe marks a glottal stop, and after a consonant a hard, ejective sound (k’, t’). The accent shows the stressed syllable: Lakȟóta.
Some words differ between men’s and women’s speech: men greet with háu, women with háŋ, and some sentences spoken by men end in -lo.
Sources
The core vocabulary comes from the Lakota part of the Comparative Siouan Dictionary (Robert L. Rankin, Richard T. Carter, A. Wesley Jones, John E. Koontz, David S. Rood and Iren Hartmann, eds., Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig 2015). It is licensed under CC BY 4.0. For this page a selection of everyday words was made, the technical transcription was converted to today’s standard orthography and the meanings were translated into five languages.
The words from ceremony, sacred beings, sky and moons, values and greetings are sourced individually; the sources are shown with each word.
Lakota ceremonies and sacred things belong to their communities. A dictionary is no substitute for learning from Lakota speakers and elders. Meanings and moon names can differ by community, family and context.