Indigenous languages of the Americas

"Amerindian language" redirects here. For the proposed language family, see Amerind languages.
Yucatec Maya writing in the Dresden Codex, ca. 11–12th century, Chichen Itza

The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, 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 a number of 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,[1] which, however, nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation, contact, and coincidence.[2]

According to UNESCO, most of the Indigenous languages of the Americas are critically endangered, and many are dormant (without native speakers but with a community of heritage-language users) or entirely extinct.[3][4] The most widely spoken Indigenous languages are Southern Quechua (spoken primarily in southern Peru and Bolivia) and Guarani (centered in Paraguay, where it shares national language status with Spanish), with perhaps six or seven million speakers apiece (including many of European descent in the case of Guarani). 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, Quiché, and Yucatec of Guatemala and 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.[5] In Canada, 133,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in the 2011 census.[6] In Greenland, about 90% of the population speaks Greenlandic, the most widely spoken Eskaleut language.

  1. ^ Greenberg, Joseph (1987). Language in the Americas. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-1315-3.
  2. ^ Campbell, Lyle (2000). American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Oxford University Press. p. 253. ISBN 978-0-19-534983-2.
  3. ^ Gordon, Raymond G. Jr., ed. (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (15th ed.). Dallas: SIL International. ISBN 1-55671-159-X.. (Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com)
  4. ^ Schwartz, Saul (2018). "The predicament of language and culture: Advocacy, anthropology, and dormant language communities". Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 28 (3): 332–355. doi:10.1111/jola.12204. S2CID 150209288.
  5. ^ "Census Shows Native Languages Count". Language Magazine. Retrieved 2020-08-16.
  6. ^ "Population by Aboriginal mother tongue, Aboriginal language spoken most often at home and Aboriginal language spoken on a regular basis at home, for Canada, provinces and territories". Retrieved May 18, 2020.