The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, before the arrival of Europeans. Over a thousand of these languages are still used in the 21st century, 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 solanguage families and isolates, as well as several 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] however, nearly all specialists reject it 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 and K'iche' of Guatemala and Yucatec of 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.
The European colonizing nations and their successor states had widely varying attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars learned and promoted the Tupi language.[9] In many Spanish colonies, Spanish missionaries often learned local languages and culture in order to preach to the natives in their own tongue and relate the Christian message to their Indigenous religions. In the British American colonies, John Eliot of the Massachusetts Bay Colony made a Bible translation in the Massachusett language, also called Wampanoag, or Natick (1661–1663); it was the first Bible printed in North America, the Eliot Indian Bible.
The Europeans also suppressed use of Indigenous languages, establishing their own languages for official communications, destroying texts in other languages, and insisted that Indigenous people learn European languages in schools. As a result, Indigenous languages suffered from cultural suppression and loss of speakers. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch, brought to the Americas by European settlers and administrators, had become the official or national languages of modern nation-states of the Americas.
Many Indigenous languages have become critically endangered, but others are vigorous and part of daily life for millions of people. Several have been given official status in the countries where they occur, such as Guarani in Paraguay. In other cases official status is limited to certain regions where the languages are most spoken. Although sometimes enshrined in constitutions as official, the languages may be used infrequently in de facto official use. Examples are Quechua in Peru and Aymara in Bolivia, where in practice, Spanish is dominant in all formal contexts.
In the North American Arctic region, Greenland in 2009 elected Kalaallisut[10] as its sole official language. 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. The US Marine Corps recruited Navajo men, who were established as code talkers during World War II.
In American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America (1997), Lyle Campbell lists several hypotheses for the historical origins of Amerindian languages.[11]
A single, one-language migration (not widely accepted)
A few linguistically distinct migrations (favored by Edward Sapir)
Multiple migrations
Multilingual migrations (single migration with multiple languages)
The influx of already diversified but related languages from the Old World
Extinction of Old World linguistic relatives (while the New World ones survived)
Migration along the Pacific coast instead of by the Bering Strait
Roger Blench (2008) has advocated the theory of multiple migrations along the Pacific coast of peoples from northeastern Asia, who already spoke diverse languages. These proliferated in the Americas.[12]
Numbers of speakers and political recognition
Countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Guyana recognize most Indigenous languages. Bolivia and Venezuela give all Indigenous languages official status.[citation needed] Canada, Argentina, and the US allow provinces and states to decide. Brazil limits recognition to localities. Colombia delegates Indigenous language recognition to its departments according to the Colombian Constitution of 1991. In Canada, Bill C-91: the Indigenous Languages Act passed in 2019, and supports Indigenous languages through sustainable funding and the Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages. The first Commissioner of Indigenous Languages in Canada is Ronald E. Ignace.[13][14][15][16][17][18][19]
In the following table, languages marked with asterisks (*) have minority status. Political entities bestowing official language status are highlighted in bold. International and unrecognized organizations are in italics.
Widely-spoken and officially-recognized Indigenous languages
The number of family members is indicated in parentheses (for example, Arauan (9) means the Arauan family consists of nine languages).
For convenience, the following list of language families is divided into three sections based on political boundaries of countries. These sections correspond roughly with the geographic regions (North, Central, and South America) but are not equivalent. This division cannot fully delineate Indigenous culture areas.
There are approximately 296 spoken (or formerly spoken) Indigenous languages north of Mexico, 269 of which are grouped into 29 families (the remaining 27 languages are either isolates or unclassified).[citation needed] The Na-Dené, Algic, and Uto-Aztecan families are the largest in terms of number of languages. Uto-Aztecan has the most speakers (1.95 million) if the languages in Mexico are considered (mostly due to 1.5 million speakers of Nahuatl); Na-Dené comes in second with approximately 200,000 speakers (nearly 180,000 of these are speakers of Navajo), and Algic in third with about 180,000 speakers (mainly Cree and Ojibwe). Na-Dené and Algic have the widest geographic distributions: Algic currently spans from northeastern Canada across much of the continent down to northeastern Mexico (due to later migrations of the Kickapoo) with two outliers in California (Yurok and Wiyot); Na-Dené spans from Alaska and western Canada through Washington, Oregon, and California to the southwestern US and northern Mexico (with one outlier in the Plains). Several families consist of only 2 or 3 languages. Demonstrating genetic relationships has proved difficult due to the great linguistic diversity present in North America. Two large (super-)family proposals, Penutian and Hokan, look particularly promising. However, even after decades of research, a large number of families remain.
North America is notable for its linguistic diversity, especially in California. This area has 18 language families comprising 74 languages (compared to two indigenous families in Europe: Indo-European and Uralic, and one isolate, Basque).[58]
Another area of considerable diversity appears to have been the Southeastern Woodlands;[citation needed] however, many of these languages became extinct from European contact and as a result they are, for the most part, absent from the historical record.[citation needed] This diversity has influenced the development of linguistic theories and practice in the US.
Due to the diversity of languages in North America, it is difficult to make generalizations for the region. Most North American languages have a relatively small number of vowels (i.e. three to five vowels). Languages of the western half of North America often have relatively large consonant inventories. The languages of the Pacific Northwest are notable for their complex phonotactics (for example, some languages have words that lack vowels entirely).[59] The languages of the Plateau area have relatively rare pharyngeals and epiglottals (they are otherwise restricted to Afroasiatic languages and the languages of the Caucasus). 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).
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. Many languages throughout North America are polysynthetic (Eskaleut languages are extreme examples), although this is not characteristic of all North American languages (contrary to what was believed by 19th-century linguists). Several families have unique traits, such as the inverse number marking of the Tanoan languages, the lexical affixes of the Wakashan, Salishan and Chimakuan languages, and the unusual verb structure of Na-Dené.
The classification below is a composite of Goddard (1996), Campbell (1997), and Mithun (1999).
Pre-contact distribution of native American languages in New Spain (Mexico, Southwest US, Central America)The Indigenous languages of Mexico that have more than 100,000 speakers todayThe Chibchan languages
In Central America the Mayan languages are among those used today. Mayan languages are spoken by at least six million Indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras. In 1996, Guatemala formally recognized 21 Mayan languages by name, and Mexico recognizes eight more. The Mayan language family is one of the best documented and most studied in the Americas. Modern Mayan languages descend from Proto-Mayan, a language thought to have been spoken at least 4,000 years ago; it has been partially reconstructed using the comparative method.
Some of the greater families of South America: dark spots are language isolates or quasi-isolate, grey spots unclassified languages or languages with doubtful classification. (Note that Quechua, the family with the most speakers, is not displayed.)A Urarinashaman, 1988
Although both North and Central America are very diverse areas, South America has a linguistic diversity rivalled by only a few other places in the world with approximately 350 languages still spoken and several hundred more spoken at first contact but now extinct. The situation of language documentation and classification into genetic families is not as advanced as in North America (which is relatively well studied in many areas). 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. Given the current employment opportunities, it is not likely that the number of specialists in SA Indian languages will increase fast enough to document most of the surviving SA languages before they go out of use, as most of them unavoidably will. More work languishes in personal files than is published, but this is a standard problem.
It is fair to say that SA and New Guinea are linguistically the poorest documented parts of the world. However, in the early 1960s fairly systematic efforts were launched in Papua New Guinea, and that area–much smaller than SA, to be sure–is in general much better documented than any part of Indigenous SA of comparable size.
As a result, many relationships between languages and language families have not been determined and some of those relationships that have been proposed are on somewhat shaky ground.
The list of language families, isolates, and unclassified languages below is a rather conservative one based on Campbell (1997). Many of the proposed (and often speculative) groupings of families can be seen in Campbell (1997), Gordon (2005), Kaufman (1990, 1994), Key (1979), Loukotka (1968), and in the Language stock proposals section below.
Hypothetical language-family proposals of American languages are often cited as uncontroversial in popular writing. However, many of these proposals have not been fully demonstrated, or even demonstrated at all. Some proposals are viewed by specialists in a favorable light, believing that genetic relationships are very likely to be established in the future (for example, the Penutian stock). 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, Hokan–Siouan, which Edward Sapir called his "wastepaper basket stock").[60] Still other proposals are almost unanimously rejected by specialists (for example, Amerind). Below is a (partial) list of some such proposals:
Discussions of past proposals can be found in Campbell (1997) and Campbell & Mithun (1979).
Amerindian linguist Lyle Campbell also assigned different percentage values of probability and confidence for various proposals of macro-families and language relationships, depending on his views of the proposals' strengths.[61] For example, the Germanic language family would receive probability and confidence percentage values of +100% and 100%, respectively. However, if Turkish and Quechua were compared, the probability value might be −95%, while the confidence value might be 95%.[clarification needed] 0% probability or confidence would mean complete uncertainty.
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. It caused Sapir to suggest that ultimately all Native American languages would turn out to be related.[citation needed]Joseph Greenberg used the pattern as evidence to support his Amerind languages proposal,[66] a controversial grouping. Johanna Nichols suggests that the pattern had spread through diffusion.[67] 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.[68] Zamponi found that Nichols's findings were distorted by her small sample size. Looking instead at data from protolanguages and isolates to represent whole families rather than individual languages, he found that about 30% of 70 languages analyzed followed the n/m pattern in North America, compared to only 5% in South America and 7% of non-American languages. Nevertheless, Zamponi concludes that because most languages of the world base their pronouns on common consonants (like m, n, t, k and s), this shared pattern cannot be used as the only proof of common ancestry.[66]
Several languages are only known by mention in historical documents or from only a few names or words. It cannot be determined that these languages actually existed or that the few recorded words are actually of known or unknown languages. Some may simply be from a historian's errors. Others are of known people with no linguistic record (sometimes due to lost records). A short list is below.
While most Indigenous languages have adopted the Latin script as the written form of their languages, a few languages have their own unique writing systems after encountering the Latin script (often through missionaries) that are still in use. All pre-Columbian Indigenous writing systems are no longer used as the primary script, but many are undergoing revitalization.
↑Gordon, Raymond G. Jr., ed. (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (15thed.). Dallas: SIL International. ISBN1-55671-159-X.. (Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com)
↑Wichmann, Soren (2006). "Mayan Historical Linguistics and Epigraphy: A New Synthesis". Annual Review of Anthropology. 35: 279–294. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123257.
↑Shapiro, Judith (1987). "From Tupã to the Land without Evil: The Christianization of Tupi-Guarani Cosmology". American Ethnologist. 1 (14): 126–139. doi:10.1525/ae.1987.14.1.02a00080.
↑Campbell, Lyle (1997). "The Origin of American Indian Languages". American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.90–106. ISBN0-19-509427-1..
↑Hudon, Marie-Ève (2022). "Official Languages and Parliament"(PDF). HillStudy (2015-131-E). Ottawa: Library of Parliament. Retrieved 2025-08-12.
↑Robert-Falcon Ouellette, Honouring Indigenous Languages Within Parliament, 2019 42-2 Canadian Parliamentary Review 3, 2019 CanLIIDocs 3786, <https://canlii.ca/t/spw6>, retrieved on 2025-08-12
↑Ruhlen, Merritt. (1991 [1987]). A Guide to the World's Languages Volume 1: Classification, p.216. Edward Arnold. Paperback: ISBN0-340-56186-6.
↑Campbell, Lyle (1997). American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America. Ch. 8 Distant Genetic Relationships, pp. 260–329. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-509427-1.
↑American-Arctic–Paleosiberian Phylum, Luoravetlan – and beyond
↑Macro-Mayan includes Mayan, Totonacan, Mixe–Zoquean, and sometimes Huave.
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† indicates an extinct language, italics indicates independent status of a language, bold indicates that a language family has at least 6 members, * indicates moribund status
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