Tribal means to do with a people grouped by descent and custom. Tribal lands, tribal art, tribal loyalties.
In America it is the correct legal term, since tribal sovereignty is a real and recognised status. Used of politics or football it means loyalty that overrides argument, which is now the commonest figurative sense.
1adjectivetribalTo do with a people grouped by descent and custom.
“The elders settled the dispute according to old tribal customs.”
tribal is a quality.
Latin tribalis comes from tribus, one of the original divisions of the Roman people.
German
Stammesgeschichte
Latin
tribālis
English, today
tribal
From Latin tribālis. by surface analysis, tribe + -al, first attested in the 1630s. The specific adjectival sense under the defunct theory of recapitulation derives from tribal history as an overly literal German Stammesgeschichte; ordinarily, Stamm would only be translated as tribe when used in its ethnographic sense.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA