Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska
and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land
masses that 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, such as in three macrofamilies of
Eskimo–Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind. This scheme is rejected by nearly all
specialists. According to UNESCO, most of the
indigenous American languages in North America are critically endangered, and
many are already extinct. The most widely spoken indigenous language is
Southern Quechua, with about 6 to 7 million speakers, primarily in South
America. Background
Thousands of 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 Mayan. The indigenous
languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from the Quechua
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 colonizers and their successor states had widely varying
attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars learned and
promoted the Tupi language. In many Latin American 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
Massachusetts translated the Bible into the Massachusett language, also called
Wampanoag, or Natick. The Europeans also suppressed use of
indigenous American languages, establishing their own languages for
official communications, destroying texts in other languages, and insisting
that indigenous people learn European languages in schools. As a result,
indigenous American 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 indigenous languages have been given official
status in the countries where they occur, such as Guaraní 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 Northern America and the Arctic
region, Greenland in 2009 adopted 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, to transmit secret US military
messages. Neither the Germans nor Japanese ever deciphered the Navajo
code, which was a code using the Navajo language. Today, governments,
universities, and indigenous peoples are continuing to work for the preservation
and revitalization of indigenous American languages.
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 New World. Language families and unclassified
languages Notes:
Extinct languages or families are indicated by: †.
The number of family members is indicated in parentheses means the
Arauan family consists of nine languages).
For convenience, the following list of language families is divided into three
sections based on political boundaries of countries. These sections correspond
roughly with the geographic regions but are not equivalent. This division cannot
fully delineate indigenous culture areas.
= North America= There are approximately 296 spoken
indigenous languages north of Mexico, 269 of which are grouped into 29
families. 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-Dene 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 U.S.
Southwest 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, look particularly promising. 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 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 influenced the development of linguistic theories and practice in
the U.S. 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 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 Tanoan, the lexical affixes of Wakashan, Salishan and Chimakuan, and
the unusual verb structure of Nadene. The classification below is a composite
of Goddard, Campbell, and Mithun. = Central America and Mexico=
In Central America the Mayan languages are among those used today. Mayan
languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in
Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras. In 1996, Guatemala formally recognized
21 Mayan languages by name, and Mexico recognizes eight more.The Mayan language
family is one of the best documented and most studied in the Americas. Modern
Mayan languages descend from Proto-Mayan, a language thought to have
been spoken at least 5,000 years ago; it has been partially reconstructed using
the comparative method. = South America and the Caribbean=
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.
Kaufman gives the following appraisal: Since the mid 1950s, the amount of
published material on SA [South America] has been gradually growing, but even so,
the number of researchers is far smaller than the growing number of linguistic
communities whose speech should be documented. Given the current employment
opportunities, it is not likely that the number of specialists in SA Indian
languages will increase fast enough to document most of the surviving SA
languages before they go out of use, as most of them unavoidably will. More work
languishes in personal files than is published, but this is a standard
problem. It is fair to say that SA and New Guinea
are linguistically the poorest documented parts of the world. However,
in the early 1960s fairly systematic efforts were launched in Papua New
Guinea, and that area – much smaller than SA, to be sure – is in general much
better documented than any part of indigenous SA of comparable size.
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, isolates,
and unclassified languages below is a rather conservative one based on
Campbell. Many of the proposed groupings of families can be seen in Campbell,
Gordon, Kaufman, Key, Loukotka, and in the Language stock proposals section
below. Language stock proposals
Hypothetical language-family proposals of American languages are often cited as
uncontroversial in popular writing. However, many of these proposals have
not been fully demonstrated, or even demonstrated 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. Other
proposals are more controversial with many linguists believing that some
genetic relationships of a proposal may be demonstrated but much of it
undemonstrated. Still other proposals are almost unanimously rejected by
specialists. Below is a list of some such proposals:
Good discussions of past proposals can be found in Campbell and Campbell &
Mithun. Amerindian linguist Lyle Campbell also
assigned different percentage values of probability and confidence for various
proposals of macro-families and language relationships, depending on his views of
the proposals' strengths. For example, the Germanic language family would
receive probability and confidence percentage values of +100% and 100%,
respectively. However, if Turkish and Quechua were compared, the probability
value might be −95%, while the confidence value might be 95%. 0%
probability or confidence would mean complete uncertainty.
Linguistic areas Unattested languages
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. A short list is below.
Loukotka reports the names of hundreds of South American languages which do not
have any linguistic documentation. Pidgins and mixed languages
Various miscellaneous languages such as pidgins, mixed languages, trade
languages, and sign languages are given below in alphabetical order.
See also Amerind languages
Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas
Classification schemes for indigenous languages of the Americas
Haplogroup Q-M242 Indigenous peoples of the Americas
Language families and languages Languages of Peru
List of endangered languages in Canada List of endangered languages in Mexico
List of endangered languages in the United States of America
List of endangered languages with mobile apps
List of indigenous languages in Argentina
Mesoamerican languages Native American Languages Act of 1990
Notes Bibliography
= North America= = South America=
External links Catálogo de línguas indígenas
sul-americanas Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía
bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos
Towards a general typology of South American indigenous languages. A
bibliographical database South American Languages
Society to Advance Indigenous Vernaculars of the United States
Indigenous Peoples Languages: Articles, News, Videos
Documentation Center of the Linguistic Minorities of Panama
The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
Indigenous Language Institute The Society for the Study of the
Indigenous Languages of the Americas Southern Oregon Digital Archives First
Nations Tribal Collection Center for the Study of the Native
Languages of the Plains and Southwest Project for the Documentation of the
Languages of Mesoamerica Programa de Formación en Educación
Intercultural Bilingüe para los Países Andinos
Native American Language Center Native Languages of the Americas
International Journal of American Linguistics
Our Languages Swadesh Lists of Brazilian Native
Languages