Native American Languages

I

Introduction

Native American Languages, the indigenous languages of the native peoples of North, Middle, and South America. The precise number of Native American languages is unknown; estimates are that about 200 distinct languages are still spoken in North America (that is, north of Mexico). Perhaps 300 to 400 more were spoken at the time of first European contact. In Middle America (Mexico and Central America) about 350 languages are known. South America has been the least studied, linguistically. About 450 languages are in use there today; information survives for 120 extinct languages, and another 1,500 to 2,000 languages are mentioned in documents.

For the number of past and present speakers of these languages, only rough estimates can be given, useful for comparison. It is believed that when Europeans arrived in the Americas, about 1.5 million people spoke Native American languages in North America (down to about 200,000 today), about 5 million in Middle America (up to about 6 million today), and about 10 to 20 million in South America (about 11 to 12 million today).

II

Major Languages

In present-day North America the indigenous languages with the most speakers are Navajo (about 148,500), Western Ojibwa (about 10,000), and the three Inuktitut languages (see Inuit). These languages have more than 70,000 speakers and Greenlandic Inuktitut serves as a national language. In Middle America (Mexico), the many varieties of Nahuatl (Aztec) are spoken by more than 1 million people, the various Mayan languages by about 2 million, and a number of other languages by several hundred thousand each. In South America, the Quechua languages, with more than 9 million speakers, are the most widely used of all Native American tongues today. Paraguayan Guaraní is the only Native American language to have become a national and literary language spoken by large numbers of non-Native Americans (many of its 4.6 million speakers are Paraguayans of European descent). In the Andes, Aymara has almost 1.8 million speakers, and in Chile and Argentina, Mapudungun has about 300,000. The vast majority of Native American languages, however, have from a few hundred to a few thousand speakers; many have fewer than 50 or 100 speakers; still many other languages have only 2 or 3 surviving speakers, making them nearly extinct.

III

Linguistic Borrowings

Native American and European colonial languages have borrowed words from one another; Native American languages have taken words from Dutch (in the Antilles), English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian (in Alaska), and French (in Canada and Louisiana). In turn, many of the European languages took over Native American place names and terms for plants and animals; examples include Alaska, from the Aleut name for the Alaskan Peninsula; Connecticut, from Mohegan (Algonquian-Ritwan), “long river”; Minnesota, from Dakota, or Sioux, “cloudy water”; Mexico and Guatemala, from Nahuatl; and Nicaragua, from an Aztec language, Pipil. English has many loanwords from Native American languages, among them kayak (Eskimo); chipmunk, opossum, raccoon, tomahawk, moccasin, squash (Algonquian); abalone (Costanoan); tomato, coyote, chilli, chocolate, peyote (Nahuatl); puma, condor, pampa, llama, alpaca (Quechua); canoe, maize, tobacco, potato (Taino—Arawakan stock). In Latin America, the Spanish language has influenced and been influenced by Quechua languages, Guaraní languages, and Nahuatl, in particular.

IV

Classification

The classification of Native American languages into families is not without controversy. By the mid-20th century, many scholars classified the North American languages into roughly 60 different language families, recognizing no demonstrable genetic relationships among them. In Middle America they proposed 19 different families, and in South America, perhaps 80 families. Other scholars proposed fewer families, claiming to see genetic relationships among most of the Native American languages. Although it is believed that the original population of the Americas came from Asia via the Bering Strait, the great genetic diversity of American languages suggests that the New World may have been populated by multiple migrations.

A major aim of linguistic work with Native American languages is their genetic classification—the organization of this vast diversity into manageable family schemes. The immensity of the body of data, coupled with the steady disappearance of language after language, makes the task awesome. In 1891 the American ethnographer, geologist, and linguist John Wesley Powell proposed 58 families for North America, mainly on the basis of superficial resemblances. At about the same time, the American linguist Daniel Brinton proposed 80 families for South America. Although methods of classification have since become more rigorous, these two schemes form the basis of all subsequent classifications. In 1929 the American anthropologist Edward Sapir grouped the families into 6 superstocks, or phyla, in North America and 15 in Middle America. Recently, however, areal studies—investigations of the borrowings of grammatical and other traits from one family to another, within a given geographic area—have shown that many remote relationships proposed earlier must now be reconsidered. The United States linguist Joseph Greenberg and others have proposed that the native languages of the Americas can be classified into just three families—Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind (with 11 branches).