Ho-Chunk
Winnebago
Hoocą́k hoit'éra
Native to	Midwestern United States
Region	Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Illinois, and Minnesota
Ethnicity	1,650 Ho-Chunk (2000 census)[1]
Native speakers	250 (2007)[1] Mainly older adults[2]
Language family	Siouan Western Siouan Mississippi Valley Chiwere–Winnebago Ho-Chunk
Writing system	Latin (Ho-Chunk alphabet), Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics
Language codes
ISO 639-3	win
Glottolog	hoch1243
ELP	Winnebago
Linguasphere	64-AAC-d
Winnebago is classified as Severely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
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The Ho-Chunk language (Hoocąk, Hocąk), also known as Winnebago, is the language of the Ho-Chunk people of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. The language is part of the Siouan language family and is closely related to other Chiwere Siouan dialects, including those of the Iowa, Missouria, and Otoe.

"Winnebago," a name now used for the Ho-Chunk who were forcibly removed to Nebraska, is an exonym, an Anglicization of the Sauk and Fox word Oinepegi.^[3][4] The anglicized form of the endonym is "Ho-Chunk".

Ho-Chunk's vowel sounds are distinguished by nasality and length. That is to say, the use of a nasal vowel or a long vowel affects a word's meaning. This is evident in examples such as pąą /pãː/ 'bag' compared to paa /paː/ 'nose', and waruc /waˈɾutʃ/ 'to eat' compared to waaruc /waːˈɾutʃ/ 'table'.^[5] All of Ho-Chunk's vowels show a length distinction, but only /i a u/ have nasal counterparts.

Ho-Chunk's consonants are listed in the following table:

Typical of Mississippi Valley Siouan languages, Ho-Chunk has aspirated /p/ and /k/ phonemes but no aspirated /t/.

In Ho-Chunk, vowels /i a u/ always occur as nasalized when they follow nasal consonants /m n/. Nasality spreads to an adjacent vowel if that vowel is nasalizable as well.^[5] Nasality spreads across syllable or word boundaries and can move across consonants /h/ and ?pojem=, but is blocked by all other consonants. Examples include nąįžą /nãĩʒã/ 'a tree' and ha'ųwį /haʔũwĩ/ 'we (exclusive) do':

Another frequently occurring nasalization pattern is /r/ to alternation: /r/ is pronounced as when it immediately follows a nasal vowel. That is shown in the definite marker /ra/ on the verb 'have' -nį- , which occurs as in the sentence 'My knife is dull' below:

There is a notable sound law in Ho-Chunk called Dorsey's Law which dictates the following:

• /ORS/ →

where O is a voiceless obstruent, R is a resonant, and S a syllabic sound. In other words, if there is an underlying voiceless obstruent (in Ho-Chunk, /p/, /c/, /k/, /s/, /š/, and /x/) followed by resonant (/r/, /n/, or ?pojem=), the vowel following the resonant is copied into the proceeding consonant cluster. All Dorsey's Law sequences attested in the language are listed below, with V representing the copied vowel:^[6]

• pVnV
• pVrV
• kVnV
• kVrV
• kVwV
• sVnV
• sVrV
• sVwV
• šVnV
• šVrV
• šVwV
• cVwV
• xVnV
• xVrV
• xVwV

Multiple sources advocate that Dorsey's Law is a synchronic process in the language because of the way that things like stress assignment and the morphological process of reduplication are affected by it.^[6][7][8]

Dorsey's Law can apply within a single morpheme, as in /pra/ becoming in the word paras '(be) wide, flat', or across morpheme boundaries, as in /šra/ becoming in the word šaraše 'you go there,' where š is the second person pronominal prefixing to the verb rahe 'to be going there.'

Ho-Chunk is a mora counting, but syllable accenting language. The stress placement of words spoken in isolation is extremely regular. Single-syllable words always have a long vowel (two moras), and stress falls on the first mora (e.g. áa 'arm'). Two-syllable words have two moras, and primary stress falls on the second mora (e.g. wajé 'dress'). In words longer than two syllables, primary stress most often falls on the third syllable, with secondary stress on each even numbered vowel after the point of primary stress (e.g. waǧįǧį́ 'ball,' or hocįcį́k 'boy').^[9][10] A few rare examples of words with primary stress not on the third syllable include booráxux 'you break something into pieces' and gikąnąhé 'to invite somebody.' These and other exceptions are a result of syllable weight affecting stress location.^[10] As seen in booráxux 'you break something into pieces,' when one of the first two syllables of a multiple-syllable word is a heavy syllable, then the main stress falls on the second syllable

Generally when words are spoken in sequence to form sentences, each retains its own stress domain. However, when two or more words are compounded, they are treated as a single word and form a new single stress domain in which the aforementioned patterns apply. Examples include hąąbókahi 'every day' (a compound consisting of hąąp 'day' and hokahí 'every') and wąągwácek 'young man' (wąąk 'man' and wacék 'young').^[10]

Ho-Chunk's stress system is substantially different from that of other Siouan languages, which have main stress on the second syllable or second mora. It is theorized that Ho-Chunk underwent a stress shift one mora to the right at some point in its history.^[10]

The official Ho-Chunk orthography derives from an Americanist version of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). As such, its graphemes broadly resemble those of IPA, and there is a close one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. The orthography differs from IPA in that the nasal vowels are indicated using an ogonek. Thus, /ĩ/, /ũ/, and /ã/ are written as į, ų, and ą, respectively. In addition, the postalveolar and palatal consonants are written as c, j, š, ž, and y (in IPA: /tʃ/, /dʒ/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/ and /j/), the velar fricative /ɣ/ is written as ǧ, and the glottal stop is written as ʼ .

The diacritic marks can be referred to in Ho-Chunk with the following terms: sįįc 'tail' for the ogonek, wookąnąk 'hat' for the haček, and hiyuša jikere 'sudden start/stop' for the glottal stop.

For a short period of time in the mid to late 1800s, Ho-Chunk was written with an adaptation of the "Ba-Be-Bi-Bo" syllabics system. As of 1994, however, the official alphabet of the Ho-Chunk Nation is an adaptation of the Latin script. The Ho-Chunk Nations of Wisconsin and Nebraska represent some sounds differently in the alphabets that they use, as the Wisconsin tribe write a double vowel to mark longer length, and the Nebraska tribe uses a macron over the vowel (compare oo with ō for IPA /o:/). These differences, shown with example words, are demonstrated in the chart below. In total, the Ho-Chunk writing system consists of 26 consonant and 16 vowel graphs/digraphs.

Source:^[5]