Kroeber and Sapir's focus on Native American languages helped establish linguistics as a truly general science and free it from its historical focus on Indo-European languages.

Since then, American English has been influenced by the languages of West Africa, the Native American population, Spanish, and immigration.

He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas who inspired him to work on Native American languages.

In the 1929 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica he published what was then the most authoritative classification of Native American languages, and the first based on evidence from modern comparative linguistics.

Robert Lowie later said that Sapir's fascination with indigenous languages stemmed from the seminar with Boas in which Boas used examples from Native American languages to disprove all of Sapir's common-sense assumptions about the basic nature of Language.

Sapir's 1905 Master's thesis was an analysis of Johann Gottfried Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language, and included examples from Inuit and Native American languages, not at all familiar to a Germanicist.

This first experience with Native American languages in the field was closely overseen by Boas, who was particularly interested in having Sapir gathering ethnological information for the Bureau.

Of all the Alaska Native languages, Central Alaskan Yup ' ik has the most speakers, with about 10, 000 of a total Yup ' ik population of 21, 000 still speaking the language.

Many Native American languages and some languages in Africa and Aboriginal Australia simply do not have infinitives or verbal nouns.

In his 1987 book Language in the Americas, while supporting the Eskimo – Aleut and Na-Dené groupings as distinct, he proposed that all the other Native American languages belong to a single language macro-family, which he termed Amerind.

American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America.

Native languages and language families of North America ( rev.

The languages of Native North America.

Rarer lateral consonants include the retroflex laterals that can be found in most Indic languages and in some Swedish dialects, and the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, found in many Native North American languages, Welsh and Zulu.

Perhaps nothing better represents this hybrid background than Mexico's languages: the country is both the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world and home to the largest number of Native American language speakers on the continent.

A central publication on this topic is the recent volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald ( 2007 ), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of " word " in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages.

Like the 1992 remake of The Last of the Mohicans and Geronimo: An American Legend ( 1993 ), Dances with Wolves employed a number of Native American actors, and made an effort to portray Indigenous languages.

Native Esperanto speakers ( in Esperanto denaskuloj or denaskaj esperantistoj ) are born into families in which Esperanto is spoken ( usually along with other languages ).

Native languages are spoken by a few hundred to a few thousand, although Enga language, used in Enga Province, is spoken by some 130, 000 people.

The American linguist William Dwight Whitney, for example, actively strove to eradicate the Native American languages arguing that their speakers were savages and would be better off abandoning their languages and learning English and adopting a civilized way of life.

* Many traditional Native American religions are fundamentally animistic.

Native speakers of a given language usually perceive one phoneme in their language as a single distinctive sound in that language and are " both unaware of and even shocked by " the allophone variations used to pronounce single phonemes.

Native Hindi speakers pronounce / व / as in vrat (' व ् रत ', fast ) but in pakwan (' पकव ा न ', food dish ), treating them as a single phoneme and without being aware of the allophone distinctions they are subconsciously making, though these are apparent to native English speakers.

That said, some people are challenging this, using arguments similar to those used by peyotist religious sects, such as the Native American Church.

Native speakers are concentrated in a contiguous area including parts of the Spanish Autonomous Communities of the Basque Country and Navarre and in the western half of the French Département of Pyrénées-Atlantiques.

Native American ballads are ballads that are native to North America ( not to be confused with ballads performed by native Americans ).

Earth-diver myths are common in Native American folklore but can be found among the Chukchi and Yukaghir, the Tatars and many Finno-Ugrian traditions.

* Flags of Native American nations in the United States are common and many tribes have chosen a flag as their symbol of choice.

The establishment of Native American governments ( which are separate and distinct from state and federal government ) exercising limited powers of sovereignty, has given rise to the concept of " bi-federalism.

Native PAGE separations are run in non-denaturing conditions.

Grits ( also sometimes called sofkee or sofkey from the Muskogee word ) are a food of Native American origin common in the Southern United States and mainly eaten at breakfast.

Native speakers of Hausa, the Hausa people are mostly to be found in Niger and in the north of Nigeria, but the language is used as a trade language across a much larger swathe of West Africa ( Benin, Ghana, Cameroon, Togo, Côte d ' Ivoire etc.

This definition excludes any works that are the result of community creativity, for example Native American songs and stories ; current legislation does not recognize the uniqueness of indigenous cultural ' property ' and its ever-changing nature.

* 1755 – French and Indian War: Braddock Expedition – British troops and colonial militiamen are ambushed and suffer a devastating defeat by French and Native American forces.

Some Louisiana urban environments have a multicultural, multilingual heritage, being so strongly influenced by an admixture of 18th century French, Spanish, Native American ( Indian ) and African cultures that they are considered to be somewhat exceptional in the U. S. Before the American influx and statehood at the beginning of the 19th century, the territory of current Louisiana State had been a Spanish and French colony.

In North and Central America, and to some extent in West Africa, Australia and other parts of the world, every male acquires at puberty a tutelary spirit ( see Demonology ); in some Native American tribes the youth kills the animal of which he dreams in his initiation fast ; its claw, skin or feathers are put into a little bag and become his " medicine " and must be carefully retained, for a " medicine " once lost can never be replaced.

Some traditional Native lands and boreal forest on the east side of Lake Winnipeg are a proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Native elements are those that are not chemically bonded to other elements.

Native elements are subdivided into groups by their structure or chemical attributes.

Native speakers who are not academic linguists may not recognize that the variants they speak are classified in linguistics as members of " Mandarin " ( or so-called " Northern dialects ") in a broader sense.

Native copper, however, was found worldwide, along with silver, gold and platinum, which were also used to make tools, jewelry, and other objects since Neolithic times.

Native Americans used red alder bark ( Alnus rubra ) to treat poison oak, insect bites, and skin irritations.

The inner bark of the alder, as well as red osier dogwood, or chokecherry, was also used by Native Americans in their smoking mixtures, known as kinnikinnick, to improve the taste of the bearberry leaf.

Native American culture is rich in myths and legends that were used to explain natural phenomena.

The Mongols also used adhesives to make their short bows, and the Native Americans of the eastern United States used a mixture of spruce gum and fat as adhesives to fashion waterproof seams in their birchbark canoes.

* Buffalo jump, a cliff used historically by Native American people to kill American bison

* Buffalo pound, an enclosure used historically by Native American people to catch and kill American bison

Then in 1948, another initiative banned the use of seine nets ( devices already used by Native Americans, and refined by later settlers ) altogether.

Coyotes have never been domesticated ( not the same thing as tamed ) with the possible exception of the Hare Indian dogs, which may have been domesticated coyotes or dog-coyote hybrids, used by the Hare Native American tribe of northern Canada for hunting.

Native Americans used cranberries in a variety of foods, especially for pemmican, wound medicine and dye.

The funds for the Charity School for Native Americans that preceded Dartmouth College were raised primarily by the efforts of a Native American named Samson Occom, and at least some of those funds were used to help found the College.

The U. S. Census Bureau used FIPS place codes database to identify legal and statistical entities for county subdivisions, places, and American Indian areas, Alaska Native areas, or Hawaiian home lands when they needed to present census data for these areas.

Native gel electrophoresis is an electrophoretic separation method typically used in proteomics and metallomics.

Native Americans had known of the tar seeps in southern California for thousands of years, and used the tar to waterproof their canoes.

Native Americans, who traditionally used homeschooling and apprenticeship, vigorously resisted compulsory education in the United States .< ref >

These actions were “ justified by a dominant belief among British colonial officials that land occupied by Native people was not being used efficiently and productively .”

* Canyon Diablo – Iron meteorite used by prehistoric Native Americans.

" Medicine man " or " medicine woman " are English terms used to describe traditional healers and spiritual leaders among Native American and other indigenous or aboriginal peoples.