User:AquitaneHungerForce

My commons page.

My contributions.

"Native American" words
A good number of articles give a "Native American word" as part of an etymology. This usually this appears in the etymology of a place name (Toponym) for a place in the United states. Sometimes other phrasing is used to communicate the same idea, e.g. "Indian word", or "Indigenous word", however "Native American word" seems to be the most popular.

What's wrong with this?
There is no Native American language. The languages spoken in the United States prior to the genocide of indigenous peoples were very diverse, including many families and language isolates. Many of these languages still survive, still representing a great diversity. For comparison over 90% of Europeans are a native speaker of a lanuge from the Indo-European language family. "Native American" as a category of languages makes sense only from a modern political perspective, not from a linguistic or cultural one.

This fact alone means that these etymologies need clarification. It is simply too vague.

Additionally this, intentionally or not, presents a number of false impressions about indigenous cultures, languages and peoples. It presents indigenous languages as uniform and interchangable, and indigenous peoples as existing only in the past.

When I see this sort of language used I seek to fix it. Ideally I'd find the language and the word (in the language's orthography) and fill in the details. So first I check for a source and try to find these things. Sometimes there is a source, but usually the source mirrors the language of the article. If there is no source I add Template:Citation needed and a Template:Clarify. If there are sources, but they don't resolve the issue, I will try following their sources, until I find answers or the chain dries up. If I can't find a source I add Template:Clarify.

Here's what I use by default:

If I find partial answers or clues, I still leave the clarify but try to put something in the talk page as a trace.

Hits
The following table summarizes my efforts on this project.

Language tagging tools
Adding language tags to foreign text helps to make wikipedia more accessible.

Here's a chart I use to find the proper tag when tagging various things.

I also keep a link to, and since these categories seem to accumulate a large number of things that should not be in them.