Tsėhesenėstsestotse

Tsėhesenėstsestotse, the language of the Cheyenne, is a Plains Algonquian tongue of the Algic family, highly polysynthetic and reshaped from Proto-Algonquian by vowel and consonant shifts, as when the ancestral word for man became Cheyenne hetane.

In the mid-seventeenth century its speakers lived between the Mississippi and Mille Lacs Lake in Minnesota, gathering wild rice and hunting bison. Driven west by the Assiniboine and later the Ojibwe and Lakota, they reached the Missouri River in 1676, learned earth-lodge village life from the Mandan and Arikara, and moved into the Black Hills.

Around 1730 they passed horses on to the Lakota, and by the later 1700s had become nomadic bison hunters on the high plains. The language has two varieties, those of the Tsétsêhéstâhese and the Só'taeo'o, who traveled together with slightly different speech and separate sacred bundles.