North American Indian Languages

North American Indian languages, those languages that are indigenous to the United States and Canada and that are spoken north of the Mexican border. A number of language groups within this area, however, extend into Mexico, some as far south as Central America. The present article focuses on the native languages of Canada, Greenland, and the United States. (For further information on the native languages of Mexico and Central America, see Mesoamerican Indian languages. See also Eskimo-Aleut languages.)

The North American Indian languages are both numerous and diverse. At the time of first European contact, there were more than 300. According to the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (endangeredlanguages.com), in the early 21st century 150 indigenous languages are still spoken in North America, 112 in the U.S. and 60 in Canada (with 22 languages having speakers in both Canada and the U.S.). Of these approximately 200 languages, 123 no longer have any native speakers (i.e., speakers of that tongue as a first language), and many have fewer than 10 speakers; all are endangered to one degree or another. The rich diversity of these languages provides a valuable laboratory for linguistics; certainly, the discipline of linguistics could not have developed as it has, especially in the United States, without the contributions that have come from the study of Native American languages. In this article the present tense will be used in referring to both extinct and surviving languages.

The North American Indian languages are so diverse that there is no feature or complex of features shared by all. At the same time, there is nothing primitive about these languages. They draw upon the same linguistic resources and display the same regularities and complexities as do the languages of Europe and elsewhere in the world. North American Indian languages have been grouped into 57 language families, including 14 larger language families, 18 smaller language families, and 25 language isolates (languages with no known relatives, thus language families with but a single member language). Geographically, too, the diversity of some areas is notable. Thirty-seven families lie west of the Rocky Mountains, and 20 of those exist solely in California; California alone thus shows more linguistic variety than all of Europe.

These language families are independent of one another, and as of the second decade of the 21st century none can be shown to be related to any other. Numerous proposals have attempted to join some of them into larger groupings made up of families claimed to be remotely related to one another. Some of those proposals are plausible enough to merit further investigation, although several border on sheer speculation. It is possible that some, perhaps most, American Indian languages are related to one another but that they separated from one another so long ago and changed so much in the intervening time that available evidence is insufficient ever to demonstrate any relationship. A major problem has to do with the difficulty in distinguishing, at the deeper historical levels, between resemblances shared because of inheritance from a common ancestor and those from linguistic borrowing.

In any case, no theory of common origin for the North American Indian languages has any serious following. Most anthropologists and linguists believe that North America was populated originally by people who migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait. There have been attempts to relate Native American languages to Asian languages, but none has gained general acceptance. The linguistic diversity of native North Americans suggests, indeed, that the area was populated as a result of at least three, possibly several, separate waves of migration from Asia. The languages they brought with them, however, have no discernible relatives in Asia.