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Native American languages are the indigenous languages of the Americas, spoken from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America. The Native American languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language isolates; proposals to group these into higher-level families have been made by some linguists, but are not generally accepted.
Archeological and DNA evidence suggests that the Americas were peopled by migrants from Siberia about 13,000 years ago. From Alaska, the descendants of those first migrants went on to people the rest of North and South America. The language spoken by these early migrants, and the process by which the current diversity of Native American languages emerged, are a matter of speculation. Some evidence suggests that the ancestors of the Na-Dene and Eskimo_Aleut speakers arrived separately from Siberia some time after the earliest settlers.
Several Native American languages have developed their own writing systems, including the Mayan languages and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. These and many other Native American languages later adapted the Roman alphabet or Canadian Syllabics. Aleut was first written by missionaries the Cyrillic Alphabet, and later in the Roman alphabet.
Subsequent to the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch were brought to the Americas by European settlers and administrators, and constitute the official languages of the independent states of the Americas, although Bolivia, Peru have one or more Native American languages as an official language in addition to Spanish. Several indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas from European languages.
The attitudes of the most of the European colonizers and their successor states toward Native American languages ranged from benign neglect to active suppression.
However, the Spanish missionaries preached the natives in local languages. They actually spread Quechua beyond its original geographic area. Native American 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. Many Native American languages are endangered, and many others are extinct, with no living native speakers.
Native American language families
- Andoque language
- Camsa language
- Cayubaba language
- Itonama language
- Kutenai language
- Pankararu language
- Puelche language
- Puinave language
- Purépecha language
- Ticuna language
- Tol language
- Tuxa language
- Warao language
- Yamana language
- Yuchi language
- Yuracare language
- Zuni language: 6,413 speakers (1980 census)
See also: Language families and languages
External Links
Native Languages of the Americas (http://www.native-languages.org/)
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