Wallace Chafe

The Caddo Language Wallace Chafe

The Caddos once inhabited a vast area that is now included in eastern Texas and parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Their descendants have lived in southwestern Oklahoma since the middle of the 19th century. Their language is distantly related to Pawnee, Arikara, Wichita, and Kitsai within the Caddoan language family. Its polysynthetic verb morphology was described in an earlier work by Lynette Melnar. Chafe's work expands on that description, adding nouns and adjectives, a collection of representative texts and an English-Caddo dictionary.