Tanoan-Kiowa languages

Tanoan, also called Kiowa-Tanoan, is a family of indigenous languages spoken in what is now New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, with a historical range reaching into Kansas. The family comprises seven languages across four branches: Kiowa, spoken by a small remaining community in southwestern Oklahoma; Jemez, also called Towa, a Pueblo language with roughly eighteen hundred speakers; the Tiwa languages, including Taos, Picuris, Southern Tiwa, and the extinct Piro; and Tewa, spoken in several New Mexico pueblos and by an outlying community in Arizona. Most Tanoan languages are concentrated among the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico, while the historically nomadic Kiowa ranged from western Montana to the southern Plains before their inclusion in the family was confirmed. Linguists once debated whether Kiowa truly belonged with the sedentary Pueblo languages because of the cultural differences between the two peoples, but shared grammatical features are now accepted as demonstrating a single family with roughly five thousand six hundred speakers combined.