Nakota Linguistic Acculturation

Nakota (Siouan) has expanded its lexicon of acculturation almost exclusively through coining and polysemy (semantic extension). The few loanwords designate only foreign types of person or animal, and some (e.g., 'pig', 'Métis') have diffused indirectly from neighboring Siouan and Algonquian languages. Loanshifts are mostly syntactic compounds that express concepts alien to traditional Nakota culture. When the influx of new entities and concepts increased at the turn of the twentieth century, semantic extension—representative of an older stratum of lexical expansion, when new experiences were commonly equated with their closest traditional analog—was replaced by coining of transparent and descriptive words.