Some terminology

See general discussion on this page.  A selection of terms:

1. Native American
2. American Indian
3. Indian
4. Amerindian
5. Eskimo / Inuit / Inuktitut / Yupik
6. First Nations / Aboriginals
7. Alaska Native
8. Indigenous
9. Native

One fairly old use of Native American is found in a tile at Fonthill in Doylestown, less than an hour from Philadelphia. See discussion of the attestation of the term there in 1909, although it is actually used elsewhere quite a bit earlier.

"Indian dialects"

The term "Indian dialect" is unfortunately common in describing Native American languages; essentially "dialect" here means a language not associated with a national government.

An edition of Frommer's Guide to New Mexico had an example of both usages at once; linguistically, Navajo is a language with its own internal dialectal differences.

"Spanish is spoken often, particularly in the small villages. You'll also hear Native American languages — Navajo (the most widely spoken surviving North American Indian dialect), Apache, Tewa, Tiwa, Zuni, Tanoan, and Keresan."

Mutual intelligibility

In this class we will observe the linguistic usage of the terms "dialect" and "language" depending mainly on mutual intelligibility. This distintion can be a tricky question in practice, since varieties of speech may differ to varying degrees. That is not a problem with the definition; it is a fact about the world.

By way of illustration, consider a situation among several towns in Oaxaca where Mixtec is spoken. This is a family of languages spoken widely in the western part of Oaxaca.

Mutual intelligibility

This diagram shows several towns with closely related varieties of Mixtec in northern Oaxaca. The numbers indicate degrees of mutual intelligibility among different villages, as a percentage.

Here 60% is considered the "critical percentage" of intelligibility to be called one language; it results in two distinct languages, as shown by the non-overlap. To some degree, this cut-off point is arbitrary, but is useful for making a practical classification. Certainly all the dialects are much closer to each other than any is to Chiginecatitlan, which supports (at a minimum) treating the latter as a distinct language.

How many languages?

See some lists of languages at these locations.

1. The Wikipedia page on Native American languages
• links to individual language "isolates", such as Zuni
• links to families, with their own lists of languages, such as Algic
2. The Ethnologue, a listing of all languages in the world
   • arranged by country, such as the United States
   • arranged by language family, such as Na-Dene

Note that the Ethnologue used to be free to access online, but not only a few page views are allowed before the paywall comes up.

Number of languages

While there are various uncertainties in determining the number of languages spoken today, much less before European contact, here are some estimates.

• North America:
  • nearly 300 north of Mexico at time of contact
  • perhaps 150 still spoken today
• Central America:
  • "several hundred"
• South America:
  • about 350 still spoken
  • perhaps over a thousand originally

(Outlines maps for use in class: US, North America, Central America, South America.)

Language families of North America

This map (from Wikipedia) shows fairly well accepted groupings of languages into families based on evidence for a genetic relationship. See also a pdf of scanned maps showing tribal territories according to cultural areas of North America.

Languages with the most speakers: USA

Many Native American languages have very few speakers, sometimes just a few elders. But certain languages have thousands of speakers. In the United States, the 20 most numerous are:

The figures come from this article, based on various sources used by the Ethnologue. Some of the figures are a few years out of date; for example, a more recent estimate gives 171,000 speakers of Navajo.

Starred languages include speakers in Canada or Mexico in the total.

Languages with the most speakers: Canada

Other than the very large number of Navajo speakers, the profile of the 20 most populous languages in Canada is similar:

The figures come from the Ethnologue.

Language families of Mesoamerica

This map shows only the currently spoken languages, but gives a good sense of the families involved.

Languages with the most speakers: Mexico

By contrast with North America, there are various languages in Latin America with far more speakers than any indigenous language in North America. These are the languages with at least 100,000 speakers in Mexico; some are closely related to others but sufficiently distinct to be classified as separate languages. Of the population of 105 million, about 8% or more than 8 million speak an indigenous language.

The figures come from the Ethnologue. A few Mayan languages in Guatemala also surpass 100,000, most dramatically Central K'iche' with 1,900,000 (which appears to be the 4th largest indigenous language of the Americas; see below). Few other languages of Central America reach these sizes, such as Mískito with 154,400 in Nicaragua and Honduras; many others have at least 10,000 speakers, such as Kekchí (Maya) with 12,286 in El Salvador and 9.000 in Belize, not to mention a good number of other languages in Mexico.

Language families of South America

This map demonstrates the huge variety of languages in this region, belonging to many different families. Work by Kauffman (1990) posits 118 language isolates and families for South America.

Languages with the most speakers: South America

Very large numbers are found for some languages in South America. Some have millions of speakers.

The figures come from the Ethnologue entries for the various countries. While such languages can be expected to survive for generations, at the same time there are many severely endangered languages in the region, especially in Brazil.