Dakota is a living indigenous language of North America belonging to the Sioux family. This grammar focuses on the description of the Santee-Sisseton dialect, and in the examples on entire sentences and text excerpts. Phonetics and phonology, the parts of speech, word formation, the grammatical categories, the simple and complex sentence structure as well as special features of the Dakota literature are discussed from a functional point of view. Dakota is considered to be a representative of the active language type and has the typical features in its grammar: a strict distinction between active and stative verbs and a dominance of the verbal stems. The coding of the syntactic functions of subject and object is based on the rigid word order subject-object-verb (SOV). The coding of the semantic roles agent, patient, recipient, etc. is based on control over the verbal action and is marked with the active vs. stative pronominal series. An inventory of locative and instrumental prefixes nuances the verb meaning, sentence-final clitics determine the pragmatic status of a sentence as a question, conjecture, narrative, etc. and optionally characterize the speaker's attitude. Parts of the lexicon are structured according to an older, no longer productive stock of nominal classifiers. Temporal, local and modal relations are expressed using an extensive inventory of adverbs, verbs and other linguistic means. With four additional introductory lessons, Dakota learners can acquire a basic inventory for easy communication.weiterlesen