Indigenous languages of the Americas


The indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, before the arrival of Europeans. Over a thousand of these languages are still used in the 21st century, while many more are now extinct. The indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other; instead, they are classified into a hundred or so language families and isolates, as well as several extinct languages that are unclassified due to the lack of information on them.
Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most widely reported is Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis; however, nearly all specialists reject it because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation, contact, and coincidence.
According to UNESCO, most of the indigenous languages of the Americas are critically endangered, and many are dormant or entirely extinct. The most widely spoken indigenous languages are Southern Quechua and Guarani, with perhaps six or seven million speakers apiece. Only half a dozen others have more than a million speakers; these are Aymara of Bolivia and Nahuatl of Mexico, with almost two million each; the Mayan languages Kekchi and K'iche' of Guatemala and Yucatec of Mexico, with about 1 million apiece; and perhaps one or two additional Quechuan languages in Peru and Ecuador. In the United States, 372,000 people reported speaking an indigenous language at home in the 2010 census. In Canada, 133,000 people reported speaking an indigenous language at home in the 2011 census. In Greenland, about 90% of the population speaks Greenlandic, the most widely spoken Eskaleut language.

Background

Over a thousand known languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of the 11th century and the end of the 15th century. Several indigenous cultures of the Americas had also developed their own writing systems, the best known being the Maya script. The indigenous languages had widely varying demographics, from the Quechuan languages, Aymara, Guarani, and Nahuatl, which had millions of active speakers, to many languages with only several hundred speakers. After pre-Columbian times, several indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas, based on European, indigenous and African languages.
The European colonizing nations and their successor states had widely varying attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars learned and promoted the Tupi language. In many Spanish colonies, Spanish missionaries often learned local languages and culture in order to preach to the natives in their own tongue and relate the Christian message to their indigenous religions. In the British American colonies, John Eliot of the Massachusetts Bay Colony made a Bible translation in the Massachusett language, also called Wampanoag, or Natick ; it was the first Bible printed in North America, the Eliot Indian Bible.
The Europeans also suppressed use of indigenous languages, establishing their own languages for official communications, destroying texts in other languages, and insisted that indigenous people learn European languages in schools. As a result, indigenous languages suffered from cultural suppression and loss of speakers. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch, brought to the Americas by European settlers and administrators, had become the official or national languages of modern nation-states of the Americas.
Many indigenous languages have become critically endangered, but others are vigorous and part of daily life for millions of people. Several have been given official status in the countries where they occur, such as Guarani in Paraguay. In other cases official status is limited to certain regions where the languages are most spoken. Although sometimes enshrined in constitutions as official, the languages may be used infrequently in de facto official use. Examples are Quechua in Peru and Aymara in Bolivia, where in practice, Spanish is dominant in all formal contexts.
In the North American Arctic region, Greenland in 2009 elected Kalaallisut as its sole official language. In the United States, the Navajo language is the most spoken Native American language, with more than 200,000 speakers in the Southwestern United States. The US Marine Corps recruited Navajo men, who were established as code talkers during World War II.

Origins

In American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America, Lyle Campbell lists several hypotheses for the historical origins of Amerindian languages.
  • A single, one-language migration
  • A few linguistically distinct migrations
  • Multiple migrations
  • Multilingual migrations
  • The influx of already diversified but related languages from the Old World
  • Extinction of Old World linguistic relatives
  • Migration along the Pacific coast instead of by the Bering Strait
Roger Blench has advocated the theory of multiple migrations along the Pacific coast of peoples from northeastern Asia, who already spoke diverse languages. These proliferated in the Americas.

Numbers of speakers and political recognition

Countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Guyana recognize most indigenous languages. Bolivia and Venezuela give all indigenous languages official status. Canada, Argentina, and the US allow provinces and states to decide. Brazil limits recognition to localities. Colombia delegates indigenous language recognition to its departments according to the Colombian Constitution of 1991. In Canada, Bill C-91: the Indigenous Languages Act passed in 2019, and supports indigenous languages through sustainable funding and the Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages. The first Commissioner of Indigenous Languages in Canada is Ronald E. Ignace.
In the following table, languages marked with asterisks have minority status. Political entities bestowing official language status are highlighted in bold. International and unrecognized organizations are in italics.

Language families and unclassified languages

Northern America

There are approximately 314 spoken indigenous languages north of Mexico grouped into 30 families and 24 isolates not counting about hundred unclassified languages. The Na-Dené, Algic, and Uto-Aztecan families are the largest in terms of number of languages. Uto-Aztecan has the most speakers if the languages in Mexico are considered ; Na-Dené comes in second with approximately 200,000 speakers, and Algic in third with about 180,000 speakers. Na-Dené and Algic have the widest geographic distributions: Algic currently spans from northeastern Canada across much of the continent down to northeastern Mexico with two outliers in California ; Na-Dené spans from Alaska and western Canada through Washington, Oregon, and California to the southwestern US and northern Mexico. 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 family proposals, Penutian and Hokan, have been proposed. However, even after decades of research, a large number of families remain.
North America is notable for its linguistic diversity, especially in California. This area has 18 language families comprising 74 languages.
Another area of considerable diversity appears to have been the Southeastern Woodlands; 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 influenced the development of linguistic theories and practice in the US.
Due to the diversity of languages in North America, it is difficult to make generalizations for the region. Most North American languages have a relatively small number of 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. The languages of the Plateau area have relatively rare pharyngeals and epiglottals. Ejective consonants are also common in western North America, although they are rare elsewhere.
Head-marking is found in many languages of North America, but outside of the Americas it is rare. Many languages throughout North America are polysynthetic, although this is not characteristic of all North American languages. Several families have unique traits, such as the inverse number marking of the Tanoan languages, the lexical affixes of the Wakashan, Salishan and Chimakuan languages, and the unusual verb structure of Na-Dené.
The classification below is a composite of Goddard, Campbell, and Mithun.