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tribelet

noun

Etymology

From tribe + -let. In use since at least 1925, the term was coined by anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber to refer to hundreds of groups of Native Americans in Central California, and has since been employed by many anthropologists to denote California groups of native people.

  1. derived from tribus
  2. derived from tribu
  3. inherited from tribe
  4. suffixed as tribelet — “tribe + let”

Definitions

  1. A small tribe of Native Americans, especially a small independent group of Native…

    A small tribe of Native Americans, especially a small independent group of Native California people who shared a language and usually comprised one principal village, or several in close proximity, plus smaller resource-gathering camps and territories.

    • Kroeber’s emphasis on the small scale of indigenous California social organizations led him to attach the diminutive "-let" to the anthropologically normative term "tribe".
    • The second feature, dialectic separateness, of course is an old story for California, but elsewhere in the state each idiom is usually common to a considerable number of tribelets or "village communities."
    • The larger tribelets usually had several permanent villages.

  2. A small tribal society in another part of the world.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for tribelet. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA