Apsáalooke-Hiraacá

Apsáalooke-Hiraacá groups Crow and Hidatsa, the two Missouri Valley Siouan languages of the Western Siouan family. Crow, whose native name Apsáalooke means children of the large-beaked bird, later mistranslated as crow, belongs to the Crow people of southeastern Montana, while Hidatsa is spoken by the Hidatsa of the Dakotas.

Their shared ancestor may have been the first tongue to split from Proto-Siouan-Catawban, and Crow and Hidatsa perhaps diverged between roughly 1200 and 1700. They retain much common vocabulary and grammar, yet are no longer mutually intelligible. Crow showed few dialect differences between its River and Mountain bands, and its grammar treats personal names as a distinct class of noun, marked by a definite suffix.