In spite of everything, there are still approximately 150 Native North American languages spoken in the United States today by more than 350,000 people, according to American Community Survey data collected from 2009 to 2013. There is the very good technical grammar and dictionary by the late Robert Young and the late William Morgan 'The Navajo Language.' Kaufman, Terrence. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. English, for example, is traceable to the Germanic languages, and theres a long written history to show how it has evolved. The language families listed on their website are Algonquian, Arawakan, Athabaskan, Caddoan, Cariban, Chibchan, Eskimo-Aleut, Gulf, Hokan, Iroquoian, Kiowa-Tanoan, Macro-Ge, Mayan, Muskogean, Oto-Manguean, Panoan, Penutian, Salishan, Siouan, Tucanoan, Tupian, Uto-Aztecan and Wakashan. Theyre one of the largest language groups, and theyre spread all across the globe. Mesoamerica (Mexico and northern Central America) had a much larger Indian populationestimated at about 20 millionwhich spoke at least 80 languages. EskimoAleut languages (Inuktitut & Inuinnaqtun), Athabaskan languages (Dane-zaa, Slavey, Chipewyan (Denesuline)/Sayisi, Carrier (Dakelh), & Sekani). (1979). Many Indigenous languages have become critically endangered, but others are vigorous and part of daily life for millions of people. Additionally, many native languages relied on oral tradition, and many written texts were destroyed, so there are few existing records from before 1850. (1994). "Lakota has several robust language revitalization efforts (Lakota Language Project, Lakota Language Consortium), which are separate from Dakota revitalization (Dakota Language Project) in coordination with Carleton College [in Minnesota].". . The area of greatest linguistic diversity appears to have been in southern Mexico and the region now occupied by the northern Central American republics. The Amerindian language family is a general term for the languages spoken in North and South America before contact with Europeans started in the 15th century. Other proposals are more controversial with many linguists believing that some genetic relationships of a proposal may be demonstrated but much of it undemonstrated (for example, HokanSiouan, which, incidentally, Edward Sapir called his "wastepaper basket stock"). The Indians of Mexico and Central America also still speak languages that date to the time of the Spanish conquest: Uto-Aztecan, a group of languages in central and parts of southern Mexico; the Maya languages, spoken in Yucatan, Guatemala, and adjacent territories; and Oto-Manguean, of central Mexico. The Tup-Guaran languages, spoken in eastern Brazil and in Paraguay, constitute a major pre-Columbian language group that has survived into modern times. In the Age of COVID-19, Native Languages Are Proving Their Longevity and Resilience, Special Offer on Antivirus Software From HowStuffWorks and TotalAV Security, Native North American Languages Spoken at Home in the United States and Puerto Rico: 2006 to 2010, "Navajo" Is the Most Common Native Language, but the Name Is Not Totally Accurate, The Reported Number of "Native Speakers" Can Be Deceiving, People Are Preserving Native Languages in Many Different Ways, Overarching Labels on Native Languages Don't Represent the Variety Within Categories, In the Age of COVID-19, Native Languages Are Proving Their Longevity and Resilience, 'Din bizaad' [or Dineh bizad, in an alternate spelling]. The Native Languages of the Americas states that there are over 25 million living speakers of an Amerindian language. Lets look at the most spoken Native American languages in the United States. . There are proposed language families within the indigenous languages of the Americas, but figuring out exactly which ones are related has proven difficult (well get more into that later). A boarding school system was established to isolate Native children and assimilate them into the dominant culture of the Christian religion and the English language. Specialists say that the entire methodology he follows is flawed, and examples like the pronouns above are not statistically significant enough to prove or disprove anything. [92], Below is a list of families with both 1sg n and 2sg m, though in some cases the evidence for one of the forms is weak.[92]. In D. L. Payne (Ed.). Indigenous languages once flourished in the United States. The classification of North American and Meso-American Indian languages. Follow activists and resources on social media: Inform yourself. While similar words across languages can be a valid part of an argument for grouping languages together, Greenbergs work has been. 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. Since Native American nouns were often whole verb-like complexes, not unlike an entire sentence, English speakers began to string nouns together to try to . Native American Languages LinkedA First [2008].") Various miscellaneous languages such as pidgins, mixed languages, trade languages, and sign languages are given below in alphabetical order. Of the 25 million Amerindian language speakers, about half a million live in either the United States or Canada. There is also some literature written in Navajo the poetry of Rex Lee Jim, of Laura Tohe (currently Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation), and of others, is sometimes written in Navajo. The indigenous languages of the southeast. It was so isolated that the US military used Din Bizaad speakers to send secret codes during WWII. North of Mexico, its estimated that roughly half of the Native American languages have become extinct, and of those still in use, more than half are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. Thats more than all of Europe has combined, he added. The state of Alaska is home to over 20 native languages. 29 May 2020. The other 10% are using linguistically unsound methods--searching two languages for any two vocabulary words that begin with the same letter, essentially, and presenting them as evidence. While the report, titled "Native North American Languages Spoken at Home in the United States and Puerto Rico: 2006 to 2010," made headlines and drew attention to the diversity of languages spoken among Native North Americans, it didn't illustrate the often-overlooked nuances between indigenous speakers. The odds of restoring many of these languages to their former glory are certainly not favorable. "Amerindian language" redirects here. Its estimated that between 1492 and 1900, the number of indigenous peoples living in U.S. territory dwindled from 10 million to less than 300,000. As a result, Indigenous languages suffered from cultural suppression and loss of speakers. Usually, academia measures linguistic similarities to primitives (numbers, grammar, and somewhat vocabulary), and the Native American languages are not even in the same academic class of languages (native American languages are linked to the people in Central Siberia aka Altaic people!!!! "But Navajos live in all 50 states and they also live in a variety of countries around the world, so Navajo is not exclusively spoken or written on the Navajo Nation; Navajos use it when they call relatives, or Skype, or whatnot, or with friends and family. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large number of language isolates), as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified because of a lack of data. South America had an aboriginal population of between 10 million and 20 million and the greatest diversity of languagesmore than 500 languages. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.). Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. "Apache is also a wide umbrella there are many 'Apachean' languages, which include Din bizaad, but no single language called Apache," Cornelius says. "But there are efforts to teach the language in schools (from early education to courses in high school to courses in college, including at Din College), and a number of language materials have been produced over the years. "We should be careful with thinking of 'speaker' as a neutral term," he says. To start, the indigenous languages of the Americas are not technically part of one big family., Thomas grew up in suburban Massachusetts, and moved to New York City for college. It is also spoken in some parts of Canada. Linguists are trying to do their best to reconstruct the evolution of languages, but theyre relying on a very incomplete set of evidence. Yet its worth mentioning because his work has been cited by many researchers, and hes left a lasting impact on this field of study. Kaufman (1994: 46) 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. Besides Proto-Eskaleut and Proto-NaDene, the families in North America with neither 1sg n or 2sg m are Atakapan, Chitimacha, Cuitlatec, Haida, Kutenai, Proto-Caddoan, Proto-Chimakuan, Proto-Comecrudan, Proto-Iroquoian, Proto-Muskogean, Proto-Siouan-Catawba, Tonkawa, Waikuri, Yana, Yuchi, Zuni. There were, however, considerable differences in the distribution of the languages and language groups and in the size of the populations that spoke these languages. In reality, there were perhaps a thousand languages spoken in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans - about 250 in the present territory of the United States alone. ", Samantha Cornelius, adjunct professor in linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington, also points out that the term "Navajo" as it refers to language isn't quite correct. In J. Mnchen: Lincom Europa. There are 574 recognized Native Nations in the United States alone. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/topic/American-Indian-languages, National Museum of the American Indian - Importance of American Indian Languages, American Indian languages - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). In America north of Mexico, more than 50 percent of the surviving languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers each. "Navajo" Is the Most Common Native Language, but the Name Is Not Totally Accurate, 2. Tup of Brazil became, after the conquest, the basis of a lngua-geral, the medium of communication for Europeans and Indians throughout the Amazonian region. In spite of everything, there are still approximately 150 Native North American languages spoken in the United States today by more than 350,000 people, according to American Community Survey data collected from 2009 to 2013. Mercury Series; Canadian Ethnology Service (No. Likewise, you see Navajo on Twitter and Facebook (it is a written language); not all of these people live on the Navajo Nation. There are 5 other sub-branches of Dakota spoken throughout Canada and the central United States. In America north of Mexico, where the Indian population was thinly spread, there were a number of language groupse.g., the Eskimo-Aleut, Algonquian, Athabascan, and Siouaneach of which covered large territories and included some 20 or more closely related idioms. "Avocado," "chilli," "chocolate," "coyote," "peyote" and . Where Are The Amerindian Languages Spoken? At these schools, children were forbidden from speaking their tribal languages, wearing their tribal clothing and observing native religions. "Related languages can be found on the Pacific Coast (Tolowa, Hupa) and in Canada and Alaska. For convenience, the following list of language families is divided into three sections based on political boundaries of countries. Political entities with. In communities as small as these, most people are bilingual, and the younger people, educated in English, often have little more than a superficial command of the native idiom. Note: Data sourced from Ethnologue. , who published multiple works on the topic in the 1980s. There are 327,000 speakers of the language and growing. It is an indigenous language of the United States since Hawaii became US territory in 1900. An expert explains. Goddard, Ives. The best known is Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis,[1] which nearly all specialists reject because of methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation, contact, and coincidence. There are 574 recognized Native Nations in the United States alone. The census stated that nearly 170,000 people speak Navajo, but that term isn't entirely accurate. It has long been observed that a remarkable number of Native American languages have a pronominal pattern with first-person singular forms in n and second-person singular forms in m. (Compare first-person singular m and second-person singular t across much of northern Eurasia, as in English me and thee, Spanish me and te, and Hungarian -m and -d.) This pattern was first noted by Alfredo Trombetti in 1905. Quechuan is one of these: it is estimated that this group of closely related dialects has several million speakers in Ecuador, Peru, and parts of Bolivia and Argentina. Most North American languages have a relatively small number of vowels (i.e. "Much research in linguistics and linguistic anthropology have asked questions about what it means to be a speaker and it isn't so simple as 'knows the language' because, as can be imagined, that begs questions as well.". Colombia delegates local Indigenous language recognition to the department level according to the Colombian Constitution of 1991. A major part of linguistic work is using modern language to recreate how languages may have historically evolved. Its hard to get exact numbers, and accounting for them all is an ongoing process, but its clear theres been a steep decline in the past few centuries. More work languishes in personal files than is published, but this is a standard problem. And while were at it, what is an official language, anyway? ), *mar 'your', *ma-t 'your', *ma 'you', *man 'you' (obj), *mam ~ *min 'your', [it 'I'], -()n 'I', nyi 'my' (also 'his/her'), A single, one-language migration (not widely accepted), A few linguistically distinct migrations (favored by, Multilingual migrations (single migration with multiple languages), The influx of already diversified but related languages from the, Migration along the Pacific coast instead of by the, Bullet points represent minority language status. Unless current trends are reversed, these endangered languages will become extinct within the . The history of indigenous (non-European) languages around the world is a history of colonization, suppression and resilience. Ejective consonants are also common in western North America, although they are rare elsewhere (except, again, for the Caucasus region, parts of Africa, and the Mayan family). Alison speaks English, Spanish, and Thai fluently and studies Czech and Turkish. The highly elaborate dances that accompanied the oral tradition are frequently also gone. Among the reasons, of course, is racism towards Navajos and the devaluing of Navajo language and culture over the decades. Most of the Yupik speakers are located in the southwestern region of Alaska. Tup was, by the early 21st century, gradually being replaced by Portuguese, but Guaran remained an important second language of modern Paraguay, and an extensive folk literature has been created. If you only look at European languages, you might think that its easy to classify languages into neat categories. Of the American Indian languages still spoken, many have only a bare handful of speakers. In America north of Mexico, more than 50 percent of the surviving languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers each. His belief in these large language families was based on comparing simple vocabulary across many languages and finding similarities. The American Indian languages do not form a single historically interrelated stock (as do the Indo-European languages), nor are there any structural features (in phonetics, grammar, or vocabulary) whereby American Indian languages can be distinguished as a whole from languages spoken elsewhere. Several families consist of only 2 or 3 languages. In. Great simplifications are in store for us. In 2021, the Bodwadmimwen language was in danger of disappearing. There are also a number of neighboring families in South America that have a tk pattern (the Duho proposal, plus possibly ArutaniSape), or an ia pattern (the Macro-J proposal, including Fulnio and Chiquitano, plus Matacoan,[95] Zamucoan and Payagu).[92]. It caused Sapir to suggest that ultimately all Native American languages would turn out to be related. Through resistance and resilience, over 150 indigenous languages remain in North America. Dakhtiyapi is the Dakota language spoken by nearly 19,000 people. (Reprinted in P. Holder (Ed. by Alison Maciejewski Cortez. Loukotka (1968) reports the names of hundreds of South American languages which do not have any linguistic documentation. This area has 18 language families comprising 74 languages (compared to four families in Europe: Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic, and Afroasiatic and one isolate, Basque).[81]. How Many People Speak An Amerindian Language? The tongue traditionally spoken by Potawatomi Native Americans had only eight people who'd learned it as their first. Mason, J. Alden. . These, according to Edward Sapir, exhibited greater and more numerous linguistic extremes than may be found in all of Europe. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Languages of the western half of North America often have relatively large consonant inventories. . As mentioned, all it takes to be called an Amerindian language is to have been spoken in the New World before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. After hundreds of years of battles, wars and atrocities, including the systematic, state-sanctioned genocide of between 9,000 and 16,000 California Indians from 1846 to 1873, the condition of the Native American population was a shell of its former self. In 2010, Stony Brook University, together with two of the Indian nations, launched a joint project to revive Shinnecock and Unkechaug, two lost languages of Long Islands tribes that hadnt been spoken in nearly 200 years. Steward (Ed.). Others were far more restricted in area and numbers of speakers. [90] This notion was rejected by Lyle Campbell, who argued that the frequency of the n/m pattern was not statistically elevated in either area compared to the rest of the world. Boas, Franz. Gallatin (1836) An early attempt at North American language classification was attempted by A. The Navajo code talkers are celebrated as heroes. [6] In Greenland, about 90% of the population speaks Greenlandic, the most widely spoken EskimoAleut language. A bibliographical database, Indigenous Peoples Languages: Articles, News, Videos, Documentation Center of the Linguistic Minorities of Panama, The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, 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 Formacin en Educacin Intercultural Bilinge para los Pases Andinos, Swadesh Lists of Brazilian Native Languages, Indigenous language families and isolates, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas&oldid=1142293786, CS1 Brazilian Portuguese-language sources (pt-br), Short description with empty Wikidata description, Wikipedia external links cleanup from January 2022, Articles with unsourced statements from July 2018, Articles with unsourced statements from December 2012, Articles with unsourced statements from June 2017, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from January 2015, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Nunavut, Northwest Territories, Quebec and Labrador, Canada, Canada (Ontario & Quebec) and US (New York), Mexico (Extinct, but retains recognition), *mi 'you', *min 'you' (obj), *min-ki 'your', *ni 'I', *ni-s 'me', *ne-r 'my', *ne-t 'my', *mi 'you', *mi-s (obj. Source: am trained as a scientist, speak like a normal person. ", The linguistic nuances of native languages are unique as well. We also offer similar resource pages for federally-recognized Indian tribes in the United States, and for tribal enrollment and genealogy.These lists are not comprehensive, so we suggest you search the web for additional resources. "Manual de las lenguas indgenas sudamericanas, I-II". Its not entirely clear how all of these languages are tied together, and even the best guesses have to rely on best guesses. Here are 5 facts you may not know about some of the most common native North American languages today. 1142). Sadly, Romance languages have nothing to do with romancing someone. Using this method, English can be "proved" to descend from Japanese--English "mistake" sounds a little like Japanese "machigai". The several variants of Nahuatl continue to be spoken by an estimated 1.5 million people, mostly still living in central Mexico. The Mayan language family is one of the best documented and most studied in the Americas. In the North American Arctic region, Greenland in 2009 adopted Kalaallisut[10] as its sole official language. The trauma and cultural damage are intergenerational and ongoing. Macro-Mayan includes Mayan, Totonacan, MixeZoquean, and sometimes Huave. Tribal colleges across the Great Lakes region were offering courses in Indian languages, and in Oklahoma, the Comanche Language and Cultural Preservation Committee developed a dictionary and language courses, as well as recordings of Comanche songs. Johanna Nichols investigated the distribution of the languages that have an n/m pattern and found that they are mostly confined to the western coast of the Americas, and that similarly they exist in East Asia and northern New Guinea. Vaas, Rdiger: 'Die Sprachen der Ureinwohner'. 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. Sioux is an interesting language because of the number of dialects it has. Because of this, he has really hard opinions about AP Style. 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. Head-marking is found in many languages of North America (as well as in Central and South America), but outside of the Americas it is rare. Technically, a language family is a group of languages that can all be traced back to a single root language.