Muskogean was the most important language family of the Native American Southeastern Culture Area. In her introduction to Florida Place Names of Indian Origin and Seminole Personal Names, Patricia Riles Wickman writes: “We shall never know with any certainty how many dialects derived from this mother tongue and from the social template that contained an … Continued
Linguists studying and comparing languages throughout the world have noted that some languages are similar to each other in terms of vocabulary, sound patterns, and grammatical structure. Using these comparisons, they group languages into language families. According to linguists Laurence C. Thompson and M. Dale Kinkade, in their chapter on languages in the Handbook of … Continued
The Athabaskan (also spelled Athapaskan and Athabascan) language family is found in the western American Indian culture areas. Linguists feel that the Athabaskan language family is one branch of a larger genetic grouping called Athabaskan-Eyak. Eyak is a single language which was spoken on the south coast of Alaska and which is nearly extinct. Proto-Athabaskan … Continued
In 1527, The Spanish soldier Pánfilio de Narváez, with a reputation for brutality and a strong desire to find gold and wealth, began his ill-fated invasion of Florida. Failing to find the mythical gold and militarily defeated by the Indians, the surviving Spanish built five boats with the intention of sailing from the panhandle of … Continued
The Salish language family is found on the Northwest Coast and in the Columbia Plateau. Salish is generally felt to have great antiquity in the Northwest Coast. Salish-speakers were the earliest settlers in the Fraser River area of British Columbia. Linguists estimate that this language family may be 6,000 years old, although some feel it … Continued
There are more than 6,000 languages in the world and only about 100 of these developed their own writing system. For most of these writing systems, we know relatively little about the individuals who actually created the writing system. The exception to this is the development of the Cherokee writing system in the nineteenth century … Continued
