The Tanoan language family has seven languages in four branches: Kiowa–Towa might form an intermediate branch, as might Tiwa–Tewa.
Name
Tanoan has long been recognized as a major family of Pueblo languages, consisting of Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa. The inclusion of Kiowa into the family was at first controversial given the cultural differences between those groups. The once-nomadic Kiowa people of the Plains are culturally quite distinct from the Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa pueblos, which obscured somewhat the linguistic connection between Tanoans and Kiowans. Linguists now accept that a Tanoan family without Kiowa would be paraphyletic, as any ancestor of the Pueblo languages would be ancestral to Kiowa as well. Kiowa may be closer to Towa than Towa is to Tiwa–Tewa. In older texts, Tanoan and Kiowa–Tanoan were used interchangeably. Because of the cultural use of the name Tanoan as signifying several peoples who share a culture, the more explicit term Kiowa–Tanoan is now commonly used for the language family as a whole, with Tanoan being the branch that contains the languages now spoken in New Mexico and Arizona The prehistory of the Kiowa people is little known. As a result, the history is obscure about the separation of the members of this language family into two groups, which they occupied from the late 18th century.
Genealogical relations
The Tanoan family has been connected to the Uto-Aztecan family in a hypothetical Aztec–Tanoan proposal. Although it is undemonstrated, many linguists find this hypothesis to be promising.
Historical phonology
The chart below contains the reconstructed consonants of the Tanoan proto-language as reconstructed by Hale based on consonant correspondences in stem-initial position. The evidence for ' comes from prefixes; ' has not been found in stem-initial position and thus is in parentheses above. Hale reconstructs the nasalization feature for nasal vowels. Vowel quality and prosodic features like vowel length, tone, and stress have not yet been reconstructed for the Tanoan family. Hale gives certain sets of vowel quality correspondences. The following table illustrates the reconstructed initial consonants in Proto-Tanoan and its reflexes in the daughter languages. As can be seen in the above table, a number of phonological mergers have occurred in the different languages. Cognate sets supporting the above are listed below:
