Amerindian_languages

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Indigenous languages of the Americas (or Amerindian Languages) are spoken by indigenous peoples from the southern tip of South America to Alaska and Greenland, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language isolates and unclassified languages. Many proposals to group these into higher-level families have been made.

Thousands of languages were spoken in North and South America prior to first contact with Europeans between the beginning of the eleventh century (Norwegian settlement of Greenland and attempted settlement of Labrador and Newfoundland) and the end of the fifteenth century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus). The attitudes of most of the European colonizers and their successor states toward Native American languages ranged from benign neglect to active suppression. John Eliot of Massachusetts, however, translated the Bible into an Algonquian language usually called Wampanoag, Massachusett or Natick (1661–63; the first Bible printed in North America) and Spanish missionaries preached to the natives in local languages. They actually spread Quechua beyond its original geographic area. Several indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas from European languages.

But in most cases, the aboriginal languages of the Americas suffered extinction. Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch were brought to the Americas by European settlers and administrators, and are the official or national languages of the modern nation-states of the Americas.

That said, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, and Greenland have one or more official indigenous languages in addition to the colonial language. Several indigenous languages of the Americas had developed their own writing systems, including the Mayan languages and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and nearby related peoples (e.g., the Pipil in El Salvador). These and many other indigenous languages later adapted the Latin alphabet or Canadian Aboriginal syllabics.

Tlingit was first written by Russian missionaries in the Cyrillic alphabet, when Alaska and the coast of North America down to Sonoma County, California, were in contact with the Russian Empire. It is now written in the Roman alphabet.

Indigenous languages vary greatly in the number of speakers, from Quechua, Aymara, Guarani, and Nahuatl with millions of active speakers to a number of languages with only a handful of elderly speakers.

Very few remain in regular usage among members of tribal communities such as the Navajo language is the most spoken in the United States of America by over 200,000 people in the Southwestern United States. It was cleverly used as a radio army code by the Navajo Code Talkers during World War II to preserve secret commands and wasn't cracked by the Nazis nor the Imperial Japanese.^{[citation needed]}

Notes:

Although both North and Central America are very diverse areas, South America has a linguistic diversity rivalled by only a few other places in the world with approximately 350 languages still spoken and an estimated 1,500 languages at first European contact. The situation of language documentation and classification into genetic families is not as advanced as in North America (which is relatively well-studied in many areas). Kaufman (1994: 46) gives the following appraisal:

As a result, many relationships between languages and language families have not been determined and some of those relationships that have been proposed are on somewhat shaky ground.

The list of language families and isolates below is a rather conservative one based on Campbell (1997). Many of the proposed (and often speculative) groupings of families can be seen in Campbell (1997), Gordon (2005), Kaufman (1990, 1994), Key (1979), Loukotka (1968), and in the Language stock proposals section below.

There are approximately 296 spoken (or formerly spoken) indigenous languages north of Mexico, 269 of which are grouped into 29 families (the remaining 27 languages are either isolates or unclassified). The Na-Dené, Algic, and Uto-Aztecan families are the largest in terms of number of languages. Uto-Aztecan has the most speakers (1.95 million) if the languages in Mexico are considered (mostly due to 1.5 million speakers of Nahuatl); Nadene comes in second with approximately 180,200 speakers (148,500 of these are speakers of Navajo). Na-Dené and Algic have the widest geographic distributions: Algic currently spans from northeastern Canada across much of the continent down to northeastern Mexico (due to later migrations of the Kickapoo) with two outliers in California (Yurok and Wiyot); Na-Dené spans from Alaska and western Canada through Washington, Oregon, and California to the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico (with one outlier in the Plains). Several families consist of only 2 or 3 languages. Demonstrating genetic relationships has proved difficult due to the great linguistic diversity present in North America. Two large (super-)family proposals, Penutian and Hokan, look particularly promising. However, even after decades of research, a large number of families and isolates remain.

North America is notable for its linguistic diversity, especially in California where it alone has 18 genetic units consisting of 74 languages (compare to the mere 3 genetic units in all of Europe: Basque, Indo-European, Uralic).^[1] Another area of considerable diversity appears to have been the Southeast; however, many of these languages became extinct from European contact and as a result they are, for the most part, absent from the historical record. This diversity has been and continues to be very influential in the development of linguistic thought in the U.S.

Due to the diversity of this area, it is difficult to make generalizations that adequately characterize the entire region. Most North American languages have a relatively small number of vowels (i.e. four or five vowels). Languages of the western half of North America often have relatively large consonant inventories. The languages of the Pacific Northwest are notable for their complex phonotactics (for example, some languages have words that lack vowels entirely). The languages of the Plateau area have relatively rare pharyngeals and epiglottals (they are otherwise restricted to Afro-Asiatic and Caucasian languages). Ejective consonants are also common in North America, although they are rare elsewhere (except, again, for the Caucasus region, parts of Africa, and the Mayan family).

Head-marking is found in many languages of North America (as well as in Central and South America), but outside of the Americas it is rare. Many languages throughout North America are polysynthetic (Eskimo-Aleut languages are extreme examples), although this is not characteristic of all North American languages (contrary to what was believed by 19th-century linguists). Several families have unique traits, such as the inverse number marking of Kiowa-Tanoan, the lexical affixes of Wakashan, Salishan and Chimakuan, and the unusual verb structure of Nadene.

The classification below is a composite of Goddard (1996), Campbell (1997), and Mithun (1999).

Many hypothetical language phylum proposals concerning American languages are often cited as uncontroversially demonstrated in more popular writings. However, many of these proposals have, in fact, not been fully demonstrated if even at all. Some proposals are viewed by specialists in a favorable light, believing that genetic relationships are very likely to be established in the future (for example, the Penutian stock). Other proposals are more controversial with many linguists believing that some genetic relationships of a proposal may be demonstrated but much of it undemonstrated (for example, Hokan, which, incidentally, Edward Sapir called his "wastepaper basket stock"). Still other proposals are almost unanimously rejected by specialists (for example, Amerind). Below is a (partial) list of some such proposals:

Good discussions of past proposals are found in Campbell (1997) and Campbell & Mithun (1979).

Several languages are only known by mention in historical documents or from only a few names or words. It cannot be determined that these languages actually existed or that the few recorded words are actually of known or unknown languages. Some may simply be from a historian's errors. Others are of known people with no linguistic record (sometimes due to lost records). A short list is below.

Loukotka (1968) reports the names of hundreds of South American languages which do not have any linguistic documentation.

The languages of the Americas often can be grouped together into linguistic areas or Sprachbunds (also known as convergence areas). The linguistic areas identified so far deserve more research to determine their validity. Knowing about Sprachbunds help historical linguists differentiate between shared areal traits and true genetic relationship. The pioneering work on American areal linguistics was a dissertation by Joel Sherzer which was published as Sherzer (1976). The following tentative list of linguistic areas is based on primarily Campbell (1997):

Antigua and Barbuda Â· Bahamas Â· Barbados Â· Belize Â· Canada Â· Costa Rica Â· Cuba Â· Dominica Â· Dominican Republic Â· El Salvador Â· Grenada Â· Guatemala Â· Haiti Â· Honduras Â· Jamaica Â· Mexico Â· Nicaragua Â· Panama¹ Â· Saint Kitts and Nevis Â· Saint Lucia Â· Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Â· Trinidad and Tobago¹ Â· United States

Anguilla Â· Aruba¹ Â· Bermuda Â· British Virgin Islands Â· Cayman Islands Â· Greenland Â· Guadeloupe Â· Martinique Â· Montserrat Â· Netherlands Antilles¹ Â· Puerto Rico Â· Saint Barthélemy Â· Saint Martin Â· Saint Pierre and Miquelon Â· Turks and Caicos Islands Â· United States Virgin Islands

Argentina Â· Bolivia Â· Brazil Â· Chile Â· Colombia Â· Ecuador Â· Guyana Â· Panama¹ Â· Paraguay Â· Peru Â· Suriname Â· Trinidad and Tobago¹ Â· Uruguay Â· Venezuela

Aruba¹ / Netherlands Antilles¹ (Netherlands) Â· Falkland Islands / South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (UK) ² / French Guiana (France)

Africa Â· Asia Â· Europe Â· North America Â· Oceania Â· South America

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