Language has a quirky way of throwing up bizarre cultural references when you’re not looking. Especially when we decide to juxtapose equivalents in two different languages. Let us take the hairstyle made famous by the Red Indians of North American. The reference is, of course, to the Mohican or Mohawk hairstyle. The very fact that there are two terms for this particular haircut is, in itself, fascinating. What is interesting is the fact that this terminology is rather confused and confusing. What Westerners and Europeans refer to as Mohican is in fact an artificial amalgam of both the Mahican and Mohegan tribes and languages, not helped by James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans which confuses the two tribes. Commonality between the two languages can be found in their shared roots as both Mahican and Mohegan belong to the Algonquian language family.
To make matters more confusing is the other term, that is Mohawk, which refers to yet another language and tribe coming from a completely different language family – Iroquoian. Therefore, in English alone we have two terms for one hairstyle that in some way reference three different native American tribes and languages belonging to two different lanaguge families.
The Polish term for the Mohican or Mohawk hairstyle is Irokez, which of course is a reference to the Iroquais Indians, a cover term which includes the Mohawks (but not the Mohegans nor the Mahicans). What is fascinating is the level of generalisation and specification used in English and in Polish. English refers to particular tribes, whereas Polish uses the cover term yet both refer to the same thing.
Interestingly, Polish culture has had an important influence on the hairstyle and the Polish Mohawk/Polish Mohican is a type of inverted Mohawk (made famous by Keith Flint of The Prodigy).
A simple haircut…