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Although the available knowledge of the Southeast tribes is somewhat limited, it is certain that the Southeast cultural area was a place of great linguistic diversity. Many of the smaller tribes in this area have disappeared, and a number of tribes are identifiable by name only. Often names of lakes, counties, and towns in the southeastern part of the United States suggest that tribes bearing those obviously Indian names must have once inhabited the area. Muskogean language family

Ethnolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and the culture it defines. Ethnolinguistics combines the fields of linguistics, the scientific study of language; and ethnology, the study of different cultures. The field is also related to anthropology, which studies the origins and development of humankind. An example of an ethnolinguistic focus would be the way different cultures perceive their physical environment. Many cultures use words related to the arrival of the sunrise and the sunset to gauge direction within a landscape. Others base their directional language on the closeness of landmarks such as rivers. The study of ethnolinguistics relates language to imagery, claiming that words derive their meanings from relative scenes and scenarios. Ethnolinguists also relate language to perception and cultural patterns and suggest that the structure of a language informs the way a person thinks.

Anthropologists believe that humans first reached North America via a land bridge called beringia that intermittently connected Alaska and Siberia between twenty thousand and five thousand years ago. They came in a series of migrations, some separated by thousands of years, and (the theory holds) each migrating group spoke a single language. As a group slowly spread through North America and perhaps into Central and South America, it fragmented into subgroups that settled different areas along the way. Many subgroups lost contact with one another. The original language the group spoke changed, because all languages evolve, and it changed at different rates and in different manners among the subgroups as each developed a distinct culture. Language families

A syllabary is a phonetic transcription of a spoken language. It is distinct from pictographs, which are symbols of objects and actions. Technically, it may also be distinguished from an alphabet; in a syllabary, symbols represent syllables, whereas in an alphabet, they represent shorter units of sound (consonants and vowels). Syllabaries

The tribes speaking Siouan languages once occupied areas as far north as Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba in Canada and lived in the United States as far south as Mississippi and Louisiana and, in isolated groups, as far east as the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia and the Carolinas. The arrival of European settlers and subsequent displacement of coastal Indians, however, led to intertribal wars that eliminated the Sioux in the Carolinas and pushed others relentlessly west. Since the nineteenth century, Sioux tribes have lived predominantly in the Great Plains and Mississippi and Missouri river valleys. Siouan language family

The Penutian languages are a classification of Native American languages that were spoken among the people of Western North America. Penutian was originally meant to categorize the language of five Native American groups from California but was later expanded to include several others in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Mexico. Over the years, the classification of Penutian languages has divided linguists. Some have argued against the original expansion while others pushed for the inclusion of additional languages. Newer evidence suggests that Native American migration may be responsible for some of the language similarities, further redefining the Penutian grouping.

The Hopi language is the language of the Hopi Native American tribe located in the southwestern United States. Long ago, the Hopi lived in pueblos, and the women cooked and cared for children while the men hunted, weaved, and practiced ceremonies. The Hopi language is a Uto-Aztecan language that developed close to northern Arizona, where the Hopi people still live today. The Hopi language is long and complicated and is not spoken by many younger members of the Hopi Nation. The lack of native Hopi speakers has led to the language being classified as Threatened by the Endangered Languages project. This means that the language is in danger of being lost if more native speakers do not begin using it. Today, more people are taught Hopi, and programs are being conducted to encourage members of the Hopi Nation to learn and use their native tongue. Although English has traditionally been taught in Native American schools, some tribal schools are also teaching Hopi.

The word “tribe” has deep roots in Indo-European languages and cultures. In Indo-European the word tre refers to trees and the way they branch. This later became the word tri, meaning one-third, or division into three parts. The word bus refers to “bush,” or branching plant. In Latin, tribus was used in reference to the three groups—Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan—who united to form Rome. The original term comes from the Etruscans. It has come into modern usage through French and Middle English derivations and was carried into North America by colonial peoples.

Linguists typically classify the Indigenous Languages of the Americas into more than fifty distinct families, which collectively comprise approximately nine hundred and fifty different tongues. However, exact statistics have proven difficult to compile, owing to the outlying nature of some native communities; this issue is especially prevalent in some parts of South America, where numerous small pockets of aborigines still live in isolation from mainstream society, inhibiting efforts to catalog and study their speech patterns.