The Gullah-Geechee and the Guale

Q: Does the name "Gullah" come from the Guale tribe, do they have Native American blood? Is the Geeche Gullah language mixed with Native American?

A: No, the Gullah are African-American people, and their creole language is a mix of English with West African languages. Since the Gullah community remained in the same region for generations instead of being broken up and moved from place to place like other enslaved groups, their unique culture survived the hardships of slavery and is still practiced today. The Gullah language (which is still spoken by some families today) is very interesting, but we do not have any resources about it ourselves--here are some good websites about the Gullah people and their language where you can learn more:
Gullah/Geechee Heritage
Gullah Language and Stories
The Gullah Creole
Being Gullah or Geechee
Gullah Storytelling

It is possible that the name "Gullah" could have indirectly come from "Guale," since an area of Georgia was named after the Guale tribe and some Gullah communities live in this region, so they might have adopted the place name as their own. However, it is more likely that the similarity in the names is a coincidence and that the Gullah people took their name from an African source. One of the websites above suggests that the name "Gullah" came from the same source as "Gola" in the West African country of Angola, where many Gullah people originated from. This seems plausible to us! In any case, there is no direct connection between the two communities, whose paths would never have had much chance to cross. The Guale tribe suffered a devastating epidemic in the 1600's century and dispersed into other tribes by the early 1700's, whereas the Gullah people began arriving in the 1700's and gained their freedom from slavery in 1865.

Hope that is interesting, have a great day!

The letter "8"

Q: In the section:  How is the Abenaki tribe organized?

in the final sentence, it reads "The leader or chief of each Abenaki band is

called sagama or sag8mo in their language."

I’m not sure but "sag8mo" seems like a typo.

Thanks for the info.

A:   Strange as it may seem, no... the "8" was an old linguistic symbol, used by missionaries, to represent a nasal "aw" sound as in "dawn," which is how the middle vowel in that word is actually pronounced.

Since most Native American languages were traditionally unwritten, the spelling systems that have been used for them have sometimes been a little on the unintuitive side.

Hope that is interesting to you. Have a good day!

Further reading:
Abenaki language
Abenaki alphabet
Abenaki tribe   

Connection between the Inuit and the Shoshone

Q: I was Just wondering if you have ever found a connection between the Inuit and the Shoshone. If so where could I find the information? I am in a college anthropology
class, and my instructor who is an anthropologist has linked the Shoshone and the Aztec. Any information you could help me with would be greatly appreciated.

A:  Thank you for writing. I'm afraid I'm a little confused by your question, though. The title of your email talks about the Inuit, but the body talks about the Aztecs. Those are two completely different civilizations. The Aztecs are indigenous people of south-central Mexico. The Inuit, also known as the Eskimos, live in the Arctic.

Your professor is correct, the Shoshone are distant relatives of the Aztecs and speak a related language. Their shared language family is known as "Uto-Aztecan" and you can learn more about it here. A good book on Native American language families in general is The Languages of Native North America.

The Inuit languages are completely unrelated to the Uto-Aztecan languages.


Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas


Further reading:
Shoshone
Aztec/Nahuatl
Inuit  

How similar are Native American languages?

Q: Hello from Denmark.

 

I wonder: How similar are the different native languages? Could a Sioux understand a member of another band?

A:  Thanks for writing. There are multiple different language families of Native American languages. People who speak languages within the same language family can understand each other to varying degrees. So, a Sioux person could probably understand an Assiniboine person. Those two languages are very closely related. Maybe it could be compared to Danish and Swedish-- some words and pronunciations are different, but speakers can mostly follow each other. For a more distantly related Siouan language, such as Osage, maybe it could be compared to Danish and English-- it's easy to see how a lot of words are related if you look, even though people can't automatically understand each other. But for other languages that don't belong to the Siouan language family at all, such as Navajo, there is no relation and Sioux people couldn't understand those languages at all unless they studied them and learned them-- more like Danish and Japanese.

Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas


Further reading:
Siouan language family
Amerindian language families  

Hello and Goodbye in Tlingit

Q: I have searched everywhere but can not find how to say "hello," "goodbye," or "how are you" in the Tlingit language. Or is there another common greeting that is used?

A: Thanks for writing. Not all languages actually have words for "hello" or "goodbye." These words seem like they should be universal to English speakers, but in fact, not all cultures make verbal announcements when they meet another person or take their leave. In the Tlingit language, there is no traditional word for "hello" or "goodbye."

"How are you?" is "Wáa sá iyatee?" in Tlingit. That is pronounced similar to "wah sah ee-yah-te." But that is not generally used as a greeting. Modern Tlingit people sometimes greet each other with "Yak'éi yagiyee" which literally means "good day."

Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas


Further reading:
Tlingit language
Tlingit tribe
Native American words

R and L in Mohawk

Q: How do you pronounce the Mohawk word Aweri (sweetheart)? I found conflicting pronunciations online. Is the "r" pronounced like an r, or like an l?

A: It depends on the dialect. In Akwesasne (and among some Six Nations speakers), it's pronounced like English "l." In other dialects, it's pronounced more like the "r" of Spanish.

Are you sure "aweri" can mean "sweetheart," though? Neither of our Mohawk speakers has ever heard it used that way. It literally means "its heart."

Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas

Further reading:
Mohawk language
Mohawk words
Iroquois tribes
 

Native American Gender

Q: I read that Native Americans didn't have male and female genders, instead they just had animate and inanimate genders. Do Native Americans still feel this way? Is this why there are two-spirits in Native American culture?

A: Actually, more than anything, this is just an example of an English word changing its meaning over time. "Gender" originally just meant "category," which is the Latin word it came from. In Latin, nouns were categorized into groups of "masculine" nouns, "feminine" nouns, and "neuter" nouns, which used different grammatical endings. (You can still see this in many European languages, like Spanish.) That is how "gender" eventually came to specifically refer to masculinity/femininity, which is how it is usually used today.

Native American languages do not have masculine or feminine noun categories. Instead, some of them (such as the Ojibwe language) have animate and inanimate noun categories. Animate nouns, like "dog," take different grammatical forms than inanimate nouns, like "shoe." When linguists talk about "animate gender," they are using the older definition of "gender," and they mean the category of words that are animate.

This doesn't mean Native American cultures don't have male and female genders, don't care about gender, or don't have any traditional gender roles. It is solely a grammar issue. For comparison, the English language also does not have any grammatical masculine or feminine noun categorization.

As for two-spirits, in some Native American tribes, two-spirits were a special class of people who displayed both masculine and feminine qualities. They are completely unrelated to grammar.

Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas

Báxoje-Jiwére

We're pleased to announce that work has been completed on the Ioway tribal documentary by filmmakers Kelly and Tammy Rundle that we have been helping to sponsor, Lost Nation: The Ioway. I know the title may seem a little apocalyptic-sounding, but it's referring to the forced migrations of the Ioway people and the loss of their homelands, not suggesting anyone's extinction or disappearance.  :-)  Both Ioway tribes were involved in this project, and-- the reason we got involved-- there is an extensive alternate soundtrack in the Báxoje (Ioway) dialect of the Chiwere language, narrated by one of the few remaining elders to speak the language well. This should be a valuable resource for the Ioway, Otoe, and Missouri people as they work to reinvigorate their language.

As of this month, all three DVD's of this documentary are now available for sale from the website above. Go on and check it out!

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Further reading:
Lost Nation: The Ioway
Ioway-Chiwere language
Ioway-Otoe-Missouria online dictionary

Iroquois and Rattlesnakes

Q: I heard that the word "Iroquois" means "rattlesnake" or "real snake" in an Algonquian language. Is this true? If so, was it an insult?

A: No one is really sure where this name first came from or what it signified. It's definitely true that the name for the Iroquois Confederacy in some Algonquian languages comes from a word for snake. In the Algonquin language, for example, the name for an Iroquois person is Nàdawe, which comes from the name of a species of snake. The word "Iroquois" is said to have been a French corruption of another Algonquian name with a similar meaning, sometimes rendered as "Irinakhoiw" or "Irinakwa." It's hard to guess at the original form of a name that's been passed around so many foreign mouths, but perhaps it had a Delaware source... in Munsee Delaware, lunii means real or typical, and axkook means snake. (You may have to be used to seeing mangled place names a lot before it occurs to you that "luniiaxkook" might turn into "irinakhoiw," but trust us, we've seen stranger ones!)

So was it supposed to be insulting? That's hard to say. Snakes have both positive and negative connotations in Algonquian cultures. There are monstrous and villainous snakes in the folklore of many Algonquian tribes, but on the other hand, snakes are also associated with awe and power (the general word for "snake" is the same as the word for "spirit" in Potawatomi.) So maybe names like these were identifying the Iroquois as enemies, or maybe they were just referring to their military might. It's also possible that like many tribal nicknames, these originally just came from a place name and had nothing to do with the people at all. An example of this is the name "Winnebago," which means "stinking water"; it wasn't meant to imply that the Ho-Chunk people were smelly, but was the name of a local river.

Native speakers being unsure of the meaning and intention of proper names is actually very common worldwide, by the way. Once a name gets strongly identified with a place or a group of people, previous meanings of the word start disappearing from memory. No one really knows where the word "German" originally came from, either.

Hope that is interesting, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas

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Further reading:
Tribal names
Algonquian languages
Iroquois Confederacy