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First language. A first language ( L1 ), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth [ 1] or within the critical period. In some countries, the term native language or mother tongue refers to the language of one's ethnic group rather than the individual's actual first language.
An indigenous language, or autochthonous language, is a language that is native to a region and spoken by its indigenous peoples. Indigenous languages are not necessarily national languages but they can be; for example, Aymara is both an indigenous language and an official language of Bolivia .
The Indigenous languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from the Quechuan languages, Aymara, Guarani, and Nahuatl, which had millions of active speakers, to many languages with only several hundred speakers. After pre-Columbian times, several Indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas, based on European, Indigenous ...
This is a list of English language words borrowed from Indigenous languages of the Americas, either directly or through intermediate European languages such as Spanish or French. It does not cover names of ethnic groups or place names derived from Indigenous languages. Most words of Native American/First Nations language origin are the common ...
Cherokee, like many Native American languages, is polysynthetic, meaning that many morphemes may be linked together to form a single word, which may be of great length. Cherokee verbs must contain at a minimum a pronominal prefix , a verb root, an aspect suffix, and a modal suffix, [ 19 ] for a total of 17 verb tenses. [ 39 ]
Ottumwa – Algonquian word possibly meaning "rippling waters", "place of perseverance or self-will", or "town". Owanka – Lakota for "good camping ground". It was originally named Wicota, a Lakota word meaning "a crowd". [ 135] Pukwana – the name given to the smoke emitted from a Native American peace pipe.
Navajo is an Athabaskan language; Navajo and Apache languages make up the southernmost branch of the family. Most of the other Athabaskan languages are located in Alaska, northwestern Canada, and along the North American Pacific coast. Most languages in the Athabaskan family have tones.
Language revitalization and Hawaiian culture has seen a major revival since the Hawaiian renaissance in the 1970s. [55] Forming in 1983, the ʻAha Pūnana Leo, meaning "language nest" in Hawaiian, opened its first center in 1984. It was a privately funded Hawaiian preschool program that invited native Hawaiian elders to speak to children in ...