Meaning of tribelet | Babel Free

Definitions

1. 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.
2. A small tribal society in another part of the world.

Examples

“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.”

“Tribelet […] defined a political and geographical unit comprising several units, usually including a principal and most powerful central village, tied by relations of kinship.”

“[…] if each tribelet was linguistically quite independent, this would have made communication in the New World a matter of the utmost difficulty for the [enslaved Africans], who would have been far more dependent than otherwise on the entirely new language that had to be learned.”

CEFR level