Blackfoot for English speakers

1. What is Blackfoot?

Blackfoot — Niitsí'powahsin, "the real language" — is an Algonquian language of the Northern Plains, spoken by the Niitsítapi in southern Alberta and northwestern Montana.⁶ It is the most phonologically and lexically divergent member of the Algonquian family and its westernmost representative, far enough from the rest that its relationship to languages like Cree or Ojibwe is real but distant.⁶

Niitsí'powahsin.

(The Blackfoot language. The people call themselves Niitsítapi, "the original people"; the confederacy collectively is Siksikáí'tsitapi.)⁶

Four nations share the language and culture, with separate governance.⁶ The English name is a translation of Siksiká, probably from the blackened soles of leather footwear.

How many speakers?

Few, and falling. Glottolog records the language as moribund; the Endangered Languages Project calls it severely endangered; UNESCO's Atlas says definitely endangered.⁸ Speaker estimates run from roughly 1,500 (Frantz 2018) to about 2,900 (Ethnologue, 2016 figure).⁶ The spread reflects genuinely different counting methods, so treat the range — not either endpoint — as the answer.

What that means for a learner: Blackfoot is a language you learn with a community, not from a book alone. Nizipuhwahsin (Real Speak) School run by the Piegan Institute, Blackfeet Community College, Red Crow Community College and the Kainai Board of Education all run immersion or language programmes.⁶ This guide is a doorway, not a substitute.

Why it is hard, honestly

Blackfoot is polysynthetic. A single word can carry what English needs a whole clause for, and nouns and verbs are never used bare — they are always inflected.⁶ Three things in particular have no English equivalent:

• Every noun is grammatically animate or inanimate, and the classification is not predictable from meaning.
• There are five persons, not three — first, second, third (proximate), fourth (obviative) and fifth (sub-obviative).
• Transitive verbs mark direct or inverse depending on who outranks whom on a person hierarchy.

Sections 6 through 9 take these one at a time.

2. Sounds and spelling

The Siksiká, Kainai and Aapátohsipikani reserves adopted a standardised Latin orthography in 1975, developed with Donald Frantz.⁶⁷ It is what the dictionary, the grammar, and the University of Lethbridge resources use, and it is what this guide uses.

Thirteen letters plus the glottal stop, two digraphs, and the diphthongs ⟨ai ao oi⟩.⁶⁷

Three vowels, and length does the work

Blackfoot has only /i o a/ — but each has a long partner, written by doubling. Consonants double too. Length is contrastive and carries grammatical weight:⁶

The single most useful pronunciation tip: never reduce an unstressed vowel to a schwa. English does this constantly; Blackfoot does not, and a schwa can make a word incomprehensible, because length — not stress-driven reduction — is doing the grammatical work.⁵

Pitch accent

Blackfoot is a pitch-accent language: pitch is contrastive and is written with an acute accent.⁶ Every word has at least one high vowel, and within a word the first accented vowel sits higher than the second. An attested near-minimal pair:

Same segments; the accent alone separates them. In practice, fluent writers often omit accent marks — much as English writers do not mark stress — so published Blackfoot is inconsistently accented. The deck accompanying this guide marks pitch only where the source printed it, for exactly that reason.

3. Greeting people

These come from two community-authored books published by the Galt Museum & Archives in Lethbridge, with language content by Julius Delaney and Terry Many Grey Horses.¹²

Reader 1 (A1.2) — Oki

A constructed teaching text, assembled from attested utterances. Every line is a complete phrase as printed in the Galt Museum books; only the order is this guide's. No verb form here was conjugated by the author.¹²

— Oki, tsanitapi? — Sokapi. Tsaniitapiiwa? — Sokapi. Tsa kitsiska'sim? — Nitsiska'sim ... Tsa kitsiska'sim? — Nitsiska'sim ... Tsima kitomahtotopa? — Nitomahtoto ... Kiitaisooksokahp? — Aa. Kaitama'tsin. — Kaitama'tsin.

— Hello, how is everything? — All is well. How are things? — All is well. What is your name? — My name is … What is your name? — My name is … Where are you from? — I am from … Did you sleep well? — Yes. See you later. — See you later.

4. Commands — and your first grammatical contrast

Blackfoot imperatives change shape depending on how many people you are talking to. This is the earliest place a learner meets systematic inflection, and the pattern is clean: -t to one person, -k to more than one.¹

ooyit and simit are shorter forms used with children.¹ Two more useful commands take an object: kayinnit kitsim "open the door!" and ookiita kitsim "close the door!"

Coming and going

These are attested full forms — learn them whole rather than trying to build them:¹

Look at the three tapo forms together and you can see the tense machinery without having to build it: nit-ai-tapo (now), nit-aak-itapo (future), nit-sit'-tapo (past). The same ai- / aak- / sit'- preverbs recur across the language.

Reader 2 (A2.1) — Tsima kitaitapohpa?

Constructed from attested utterances, as in Reader 1.¹²

— Oki. Tsa kitsitaikiih'pa? — Nita'pai'ksika'yi. Kiitaikihpa? — Nitaitapo. Tsima kitaitapohpa? — Nitaakitapo. Kiitaaksikiihpa? — Sokapi. Annia. — Piit! Makoapiit. — Ooyiita, simita. — Aa. Kaitama'tsin.

— Hello. What is on your mind? — I am walking about. What are you doing? — I am going there. Where are you going? — I will go there. What are you going to do? — All is well. OK now. — Come in! Sit down. — Eat, drink. — Yes. See you later.

On length: about 220 characters of Blackfoot. A longer reader would mean inventing verb forms, and in a polysynthetic language that is not a small liberty — it would produce words no speaker has said. It stops here deliberately.

5. Numbers and colours

Blackfoot has two counting series — one for general use and one for counting animals. That is your first taste of how deeply animacy runs through the language.¹⁵

Counting people uses its own forms again: nitsitapi "one person," natsitapi "two people."¹

Colours are verbs

This surprises English speakers: Blackfoot colour words are stative verbs, not adjectives. siksinaattsi does not mean "black" — it means "it is black."¹⁵

The animate forms take -wa: siksinaattsiwa "it (animate) is black," mi'ksinaattsiwa "it (animate) is red."¹ Which brings us to the heart of the grammar.

6. Animacy: the foundation

Every Blackfoot noun is either animate or inanimate, and they take different endings.³⁶ This is a grammatical class, not a biological one — some plainly inanimate objects, drums and knives among them, are grammatically animate.

The first two pairs come straight from the University of Lethbridge grammar site; the third is quoted from Frantz.³⁶ The dictionary marks the class with a prefix: na- animate, ni- inanimate, nx- for nouns that go either way.³

Verbs must agree with the animacy of their arguments — and speakers hold the line even in stories where inanimate objects talk. A narrated flower that speaks still takes inanimate agreement.⁶

Demonstratives agree too

Four verb classes

Because animacy and transitivity interact, every verb belongs to one of four classes:³⁶

• II — intransitive inanimate (the subject is inanimate)
• AI — intransitive animate (the subject is animate): á'po'taki "to work", áyo'kaa "to sleep", áínihkii "to sing"
• TI — transitive inanimate (the object is inanimate): oowatoo "to eat something"
• TA — transitive animate (the object is animate)

You cannot use a verb without knowing its class, which is why dictionary entries label it. This is the single biggest bookkeeping difference from English.

7. Five persons, not three

English has three grammatical persons. Blackfoot has five: first, second, third (proximate), fourth (obviative) and fifth (sub-obviative).⁶

When a sentence has two or more specific animate third persons, the language forces you to rank them. The more discourse-prominent one is proximate; the others are obviative — the traditional "fourth person." A clause may have only one proximate but several obviatives.⁶ English does this with word order and context; Blackfoot does it morphologically, so "he saw his father" is never ambiguous about whose father.

Subjects must be specific — and willing

A subject has to be grammatically particular, pointing at a real identifiable referent. A transitive subject must additionally be volitional. If it is neither, the verb takes unspecified-subject inflection instead:⁶

Oma isttoána iihtsíkahksiniiʼpi annistsi ikkstsíksiistsi.

om-wa isttoan-wa iiht-íkahksinii-ʼp-yi ann-istsi ikkstsíksi-istsi — that-AN.SG knife-AN.SG means-cut.off-UNSPEC.SUB-INAN.PL that-INAN.PL branch-INAN.PL — "The knife cut off those branches" / "By means of the knife, the branches were cut off." A knife cannot want anything, so it cannot be a transitive subject; the language reroutes the sentence.⁶

Reader 3 (B1.2) — attested sentences, glossed

These are attested sentences, not a constructed passage. Each is quoted from Frantz's grammar via the research dossier, with its interlinear gloss.⁶ Read them as a set of worked examples: this is what a Blackfoot clause actually looks like.

Omiksi áyo'kaiksi.

om-iksi á-yo'kaa-iksi — that-AN.PL DUR-sleep-AN.PL — "those sleeping ones"

Oma nínaawa áyo'kaawa nóoma.

om-wa ninaa-wa á-yo'kaa-wa n-oom-wa — that-AN.SG man-AN.SG DUR-sleep-AN.SG 1.POSS-husband-AN.SG — "That man who is sleeping is my husband."

Omiksi aakííkoaiksi áínihkiiksi áyaakahkayiyaawa.

om-iksi aakííkoaN-iksi á-Inihki-iksi áyaak-wa:hkayi-yi-aawa — that-AN.PL girl-AN.PL DUR-sing-AN.PL FUT-go.home-3PL-PRO — "Those girls who are singing are on their way home."

Oma imitááwa siiksípohsiwa.

om-wa imitáá-wa siiksip-o:hsi-wa — that-AN.SG dog-AN.SG PST:bite(TA)-REFL(AI)-3SG — "That dog bit itself." The reflexive suffix turns a transitive-animate stem into an intransitive-animate one.

Relative clauses like the second and third examples are described as rare in Blackfoot; to embed a clause you must first nominalise it.⁶

8. Direct and inverse

This is the feature that makes Algonquian languages famous. When a transitive-animate verb has two animate arguments, Blackfoot does not rely on word order to say who did what. It marks the verb direct if the subject outranks the object on the person hierarchy, and inverse if the object outranks the subject.⁶

The two sentences share every word. Only the theme marker changes — -ayi against -oki — and that single suffix reverses who loves whom. Word order does nothing here.

The deck lists both forms: nitsikakomimmayi and nitsikakomimmoki.⁶

The hierarchy debate

It has been claimed that Blackfoot, like other Algonquian languages, violates the proposed Universal Person Hierarchy by ranking second person above first — 2 > 1 > 3 proximate > 4 obviative, rather than the hypothesised universal 1 > 2 > 3 > 4.⁶ Other analyses argue the universal hierarchy does apply after all. Both positions are live in the literature and this guide does not adjudicate between them.

9. Inside the verb

The only obligatory element of a Blackfoot clause is the verb — the "verbal complex." Its template is:⁶

preverb – root – medial – final

• Preverbs carry adverbial meaning, most pronouns, locatives, manner, aspect, mood and tense.
• Medials carry manner and incorporated objects.
• Finals carry transitivity, animacy and valency — including direct/inverse marking and the causative, benefactive, reciprocal and reflexive suffixes.
• Root and final are obligatory; preverb and medial are optional.

Two sound rules worth knowing

Frantz, pp. 155 and 157, via the research dossier.⁶ Glides drop after a consonant but survive elsewhere — which is why the same stem looks different in different environments.

10. What English speakers get wrong

• Guessing animacy from meaning. It is a grammatical class. Drums and knives are animate; you have to learn the class with the noun.
• Reducing vowels to schwa. The most damaging habit an English speaker brings. Length carries meaning; a schwa can destroy the word.⁵
• Ignoring the accent. ápssiwa and apssíwa are different words. Published text often omits the marks, which makes listening — not reading — the reliable teacher.
• Assuming word order signals who did what. In a transitive-animate clause the direct/inverse marker does that job. Word order is flexible precisely because the verb already carries the information.⁶
• Using a verb without knowing its class. II, AI, TI and TA verbs are not interchangeable, and the dictionary labels them for a reason.
• Building words from a morpheme table. Tempting for a polysynthetic language and almost always wrong. Learn attested whole forms first.
• Treating the four nations' speech as identical. See section 11.
• Aspirating p, t, k. They are unaspirated, as in spin, star, skate.⁵

11. Four nations, two generations, several orthographies

Blackfoot varies by nation and by generation, and the differences are lexical as much as phonetic.⁶

There is also an Old / New Blackfoot distinction that speakers themselves name — a generational register difference, not a regional one:¹⁶

And a written/spoken split worth hearing: tsa anistapiiwa? contracts to tsistapii? "what is it?", and nitaakitapoo to taakitapoo "I am going there."¹ Learners who only read will not recognise the spoken forms.

Competing writing systems

The 1975 Frantz orthography is standard in Alberta, but at least three other Latin systems are in use, mainly in Montana schools:⁶

• Big Bull, created by William Big Bull, a Piikani teacher at Blackfeet Community College — 35 letters and three diacritics.
• Holterman, developed by Jack Holterman and used by the Piegan Institute — 15 letters, uses ⟨z⟩ for /ts/ and ⟨x⟩ for /ks/, and marks neither vowel length nor the glottal stop.
• Weatherwax, developed by Elder Wayne Weatherwax — 12 letters, intended for phonetic purposes.

The dossier rates the relative-prevalence claims about these systems as moderate to low confidence — they rest on a single intermediary source — so treat the list as evidence that plural systems exist, not as a ranking.

Blackfoot syllabics

A syllabic script was created around 1888 by the Anglican missionary John William Tims for Bible translation, loosely derived from Western Cree syllabics but with different letter values.⁶ It over-differentiated relative to the actual phoneme inventory — it included a separate symbol for [e], which is only an allophone of /ai/ — and marked neither vowel length nor the glottal stop. It has, by most accounts, effectively disappeared; present-day speakers use the Latin alphabet.

12. Community, culture and where the evidence runs out

Blackfoot is not a heritage curiosity. It is the language of four living nations, and the most important thing an outside learner can understand is that revitalisation is community-led and community-owned.⁶

• Nizipuhwahsin (Real Speak) School, run by the Piegan Institute in Browning, Montana — a full immersion school.
• Blackfeet Community College (Browning) and Red Crow Community College (Kainai) both run Blackfoot language programmes.
• Kainai Board of Education delivers Blackfoot instruction in Alberta schools.
• Blackfoot Language Resources (blackfoot.algonquianlanguages.ca), directed by Inge Genee and Marie-Odile Junker with community partners — grammar, dictionary and audio.³
• Galt Museum & Archives, Lethbridge — publisher of the two community-authored language books that supply most of the vocabulary in this guide's deck.¹²

Akaitsinikssiistsi: Blackfoot Stories of Old is the standard published collection of traditional narrative. Blackfoot-language radio and podcasting exist, and Blackfoot authors and filmmakers work in both languages.

On restricted material: ceremonial and sacred knowledge is deliberately out of scope here, as it is in the research behind this guide. Some Blackfoot cultural material is not for general publication, and a language guide is not the right place for it. Learn that material, if at all, from the community and on its terms.

What this guide could not tell you

• Most Frantz material reaches this guide through the research dossier's mediation of secondary sources rather than direct reading of the grammar. Page numbers are reproduced as given; treat them as pointers, not as verified quotations.
• No connected traditional narrative was fetched and re-transcribed, so there is no long attested reader here. Akaitsinikssiistsi would be the source for a future run.
• The sub-obviative (fifth person) is named but not exemplified — no attested example was available.
• Full TAM paradigms and the complete valency-changing system are not tabulated.
• Relative prevalence of the four orthographies is not established.

These are documented gaps, not claims that Blackfoot lacks these things.

• Blackfoot Language Resources (University of Lethbridge / Carleton)A1–C2 — Community-partnered grammar, dictionary and audio — the best free starting point
• Blackfoot Dictionary of Stems, Roots and Affixes (Frantz & Russell, 3rd ed.)B1–C2 — The authoritative dictionary, searchable online
• Blackfoot Language Workbook (Delaney & Many Grey Horses, Galt Museum, 2020)A1–A2 — Free community-authored PDF workbook — greetings, numbers, kinship, animals
• Blackfoot Language Book: Niitsi'powahsin (Galt Museum, 2024)A1–B1 — The companion volume, with language content by Julius Delaney
• Niitsitapiisini: Our Way of Life — Glossary of Blackfoot Terms (Glenbow Museum)A2–B1 — Cultural vocabulary in context, from the Glenbow teacher toolkit
• Blackfoot words (Native Languages of the Americas)A1 — Wordlists and a pronunciation guide — non-academic, useful for cross-checking
• Glottolog — Blackfoot (siks1238)reference — Classification and endangerment status