Native American Loanwords in Contemporary American English : History and Development – Reese Katharina (2013)

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1.0, Free University of Berlin (John-F. Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien), course: Language Change II: Language Contact Phenomena and Change in English, language: English, abstract: The number of indigenous people that inhabited the American continent before the European settlers arrived is still debated today. Based on numerous different sources, both printed and online, it ranges from 8 million to 112 million people who lived in tribal societies. Those tribes were often very different in the way they lived: some societies were nomadic tribes, their major source of food being hunting - which was why they followed their prey. Others lived from growing maize and plants. Still others in the rocky desert regions lived in houses which they built using the natural rock foundations of the area. There were different sizes of tribes, some being rather small, and some being huge, like for example the Aztec societies or the Anasazi people. But no matter what size the population of a tribe was, or how advanced they were in their way of life, there's one thing all of them had in common: the...