indian borrowings in english

Topicallity. American Indian language is a group of languages that once covered and today still partially cover all of South America, the Antilles, and Central America to the south of a line from the Gulf of Honduras to the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. Estimates of the number of speakers in that area in pre-Columbian times vary from 10,000,000 to 20,000,000. In the early 1980s there were approximately 15,900,000, more than three-fourths of them in the central Andean areas. Language lists include around 1,500 languages, and figures over 2,000 have been suggested. For the most part, the larger estimate refers to tribal units whose linguistic differentiation cannot be determined. Because of extinct tribes with unrecorded languages, the number of languages formerly spoken is impossible to assess. Only between 550 and 600 languages (about 120 now extinct) are attested by linguistic materials. Fragmentary knowledge hinders the distinction between language and dialect and thus renders the number of languages indeterminate.
Because the South American Indians originally came from North America, the problem of their linguistic origin involves tracing genetic affiliations with North American groups. To date only Uru-Chipaya, a language in Bolivia, is surely relatable to a Macro-Mayan phylum of North America and Mesoamerica. Hypotheses about the probable centre of dispersion of language groups within South America have been advanced for stocks like Arawakan and Tupian, based on the principle (considered questionable by some) that the area in which there is the greatest variety of dialects and languages was probably the centre from which the language groups dispersed at one time; but the regions in question seem to be refugee regions, to which certain speakers fled, rather than dispersion centres.
South America is one of the most linguistically differentiated areas of the world. Various scholars hold the plausible view that all American Indian languages are ultimately...

Four hundred years ago, Carew correctly characterized the tendency of anglophone speakers to profit from the selective appropriation of other languages. Except for novel loanwords reflecting the curiosities of settlers, borrowings from Indigenous languages rapidly decreased as Europeans consolidated power in North America (Bailey 71). Instead of loanwords, settlers adapted English to describe the world they attempted to anglicize; many of those adaptations survive in the lexicon as Indianisms, which can carry significant racial overtones. In visually representing Indianisms, American Indian team names and mascots (as well as corporate logos) reveal embedded, often unconscious national perceptions of the mythical Indian. The continued use of such mascots is not, as the Honor the Chief Society argues, a matter of educating the American public of “its” Native heritage. Truly valuing Indigenous survival, culture, and language means quite the opposite.
Anglophone speakers have long mediated Indigenous loanwords through Spanish, French, Portuguese, and other European languages. Unlike French fur traders, for instance, who experienced frequent cultural exchanges with American Indians and First Nations people of Canada, English settlers shared little two-way contact with North America’s oldest residents. Generally, interactions were brief, and often militant in nature, as English adventurers suppressed and supplanted Aboriginal populations. Consequently, despite more than four sustained centuries on the continent, the English language has only superficial borrowings from North America’s Indigenous languages.
Indigenous words borrowed secondhand from European languages include bayou, canoe, Caribbean, caribou, chocolate, hammock, hurricane, potato, tobacco, toboggan, tomato, and totem. Though English did borrow some words and place names directly – skunk, manitou, and Roanoke are examples – the lexicon’s Indigenous loanwords reflect a long-standing racial bias toward...