The Cahuapanan languages include two languages, Chayahuita and Jebero. They are spoken by more than 11,300 people in Peru. Chayahuita is spoken by about that many people but Jebero is almost extinct.
Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family, because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram.
Languages that cannot be reliably classified into any family are known as language isolates.
There has been very little historical linguistic research on sign languages, and few attempts to determine genetic relationships between sign languages, other than simple comparison of lexical data and some discussion about whether certain sign languages are dialects of a language or languages of a family.
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.
The language or languages spoken by these early migrants, and the process by which the current diversity of indigenous languages in the Americas emerged, are a matter of speculation.
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.
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