Native American Languagesfunction switchit(list){var listElementStyle=document.getElementById(list).style;if (listElementStyle.display=="none"){listElementStyle.display="block";}else {listElementStyle.display="none";}} Indigenous Peoples' LiteratureIndigenous Languages Cheyenne Language Web SiteConservation of Endangered Languages Ernie's Learn to Speak a Little Hawaiian Ethnologue: Languages of the worldHuman-Languages Page Index of Native American Language Indians Work To Save a Language--and Their Heritage Lakota Language Translation On-Line Dictionary Language Families of the World Linguistics Maori Language Native American LanguagesNative Languages of the AmericasNative Fonts Ojibwe Language and Culture Oneida Indian Language Project Raven's Tsalagi (Cherokee) Page Translation Humor University of Michigan Linguistics Archive History and Discussion of Native American LanguagesAt the time of first European contact, probably close to 1,000 AmericanIndian languages were spoken in North, Central, and South America. Althoughthe number of languages in daily use has steadily declined because of persecutionand pressures on the Indians to adopt English, Spanish, and other originallyEuropean languages, well over 700 different American Indian--or, as theyare sometimes called, Amerindian or Native American--languages are spokentoday. In the United States many of the most famous linguists of the early20th century--among them Franz BOAS, Leonard BLOOMFIELD, and Edward SAPIR--transcribedand analyzed North American Indian languages. Many descriptions of Indianlanguages are important in the literature of the linguistic school knownas American structuralism. Today interest in Native American Indian languages is increasing, andAmericanists, as those who study the languages are called, hold regularmeetings to report on their findings. Current research on the native languagesof the Americas is published in several periodicals, notably the InternationalJournal of American Linguistics. The great diversity of Indian languages, however, has thus far preventedproof of common origin, and most Americanists favor more conservative classificationsof the languages into a number of distinct groups. Only a few Native American Indian languages have a written history;therefore, comparative study must be based upon quite recent sources. Followingthe traditional principles of historical linguistics, words from Indianlanguages believed to be related are subjected to minute comparison, ina search for regular correspondences of sound and meaning. Regularity is the key: thus, while Luiseno paa-la, Papago wa-, and Azteca-tl, all meaning "water," do not immediately appear similar,the words are seen to be cognate (derived from the same word in the ancestorlanguage) when other sets such as Luiseno pe-t, Papago woog, and Azteco-tli, all meaning "road," are considered, since Luiseno initialp and Papago initial w regularly correspond to the lack of any initialconsonant sound in Aztec. When such correspondences are discovered, the languages being comparedare judged to have a historical connection, either genetic--because ofdescent from a common ancestor--or through language contact and the consequent"borrowing" of words. As genetic relationships are discovered,languages are grouped into families, which then are often compared themselves.Related families can be classified in turn into larger groups called phyla(singular, phylum) or stocks, or into even broader groupings known as macrophylaor superstocks. On the basis of the Luiseno, Papago, and Aztec words cited above, linguistshave proposed the reconstruction of initial p sound in the words for "water"and "road" in the Proto-Uto-Aztecan ancestor of the three languagesin question. The sounds systems and vocabulary of the ancestors of a numberof different American Indian language families have been partially reconstructedthrough similarly detailed analysis by linguists. Comparison of these reconstructedprotolanguages leads to more informed conjecture about earlier connectionsbetween the ancestor languages and the peoples who spoke them. Language Names Names for Native American Indian languages can be confusing. Some namesare chosen politically rather than linguistically: for instance, Creekand Seminole are mutually intelligible Muskogean languages but are traditionallytreated as separate because the tribes who use them are different. ManyNative American Indian tribes use the word for "people" as themeaning of their nation. Often Indian groups come to be known by a foreign term, such as theEnglish names Dogrib and Yellowknife for Athabascan tribes in the Northwestor the naming of most Coastal California languages for the nearest Spanishmission (Luiseno was the Uto-Aztecan language spoken around Mission SanLuis Rey, for example, and the Chumash language Obispeno was named forMission San Luis Obispo). Some other designations, occasionally derogatory,originated with other Indians--the name Comanche, for example, is fromSouthern Paiute kimantsi, "stranger." Both languages are Uto-Aztecan.In some cases the same name has been used for two or more distinct languages.For instance, there are two languages in Central America called "Chontal,"one Hokan and one Mayan. The names of linguistic families and stocks are usually coined by linguists,often by adding -an to the name of a representative language. The Yumanfamily, for example, is named for the language Yuma. Languages of Canada and the United States Perhaps 300 languages were spoken in Canada and the United States whenthe first Europeans arrived, and about 200 are still spoken by some 300,000people. The American explorer and ethnologist John Wesley POWELL presentedthe first comprehensive classification of the languages north of Mexicoin 1891, dividing them into 58 families. Various scholars have subsequentlyproposed consolidation of Powell's families into a smaller number of phyla,with the most influential of these classifications credited to Edward Sapir.C.F. and F.M. Voegelin introduced the most widely accepted modern classificationof American Indian languages, grouping most of the languages of the UnitedStates and Canada into seven macrophyla, with a few families and languageisolates left unclassified (Table 1). One phylum, American Arctic-Paleosiberian, includes both Eskimo-Aleut,spoken from Alaska to Greenland, and the Chukchi-Kamchatkan family of Siberia.This phylum is the only American language family to have an accepted connectionwith a non-American language group. Meso-American Languages Recent estimates place the number of Meso American Indian languagesat about 70, with at least 5 million speakers. Of course, language boundariesand political boundaries do not coincide. The Hokan and Aztec-Tanoan phylaof North America also include a number of Central or Meso-American languages,and some South American groups have outlying representatives in CentralAmerica. Many of the groupings in Table 2 are still highly controversial.South American Languages Linguistic diversity is greatest in South America, where many languagesspoken in remote jungle and mountain regions remain unrecorded and unclassified.There are probably over 500 different languages still spoken, with perhaps14 million speakers. The various languages of the Quechua group alone have5 million speakers. Broader classifications of the more than 80 South American languagefamilies into a smaller number of macrophyla have been proposed by JosephGreenberg, Morris Swadesh, Cestmir Loukotka, and others. Because theseSouth American stocks have not as yet been fully documented with listsof cognate sets, they are not accepted by all specialists. Recent Controversy Current scholarly approaches to Native American Indian language classificationare polarized. Most Americanists accept only certain parts of the Voegelinclassification, while rejecting others, with the Macro-Penutian and Hokanphyla of North America receiving most challenges. Joseph Greenberg recentlyproposed a new classification, with just three groups of languages: Eskimo-Aleut,Na-Dene, and a third stock, Amerind, which includes all the other languagesof North, Central, and South America. Although some mainstream Americanistsfind this proposal intriguing, they have criticized Greenberg's researchfor its methodology and data, and the theory is not widely accepted. GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE The grammatical structure--phonology, or sound system; morphology, orword structure; and syntax, or sentence structure--of Native American Indianlanguages varies considerably, but none of the languages can be calledprimitive. Phonology Though some Indian languages have a simple phonologicalstructure (the Arawakan language Campa, for instance, has only 17 contrastivespeech sounds, or phonemes), the phonology of others is very complex. Certainsounds, many of which are articulated toward the back of the vocal tract,have been cited as characteristic of the American Indian languages, butnone of these occur in all the languages. The glottal stop, made by brieflyclosing the vocal cords, as in the middle of the English word uh-oh, isa common sound. Many languages have glottalized consonants, made with aglottal stop produced simultaneously with another consonant sound. Forinstance, Navajo ts'in, meaning "bone," has a glottalized tssound (represented by ts'), while tsin, "tree" has a plain ts.Another common sound is a back k sound, normally written q, articulatednot at the velum, as is English k, but rather in the postvelar or uvularregion. Many languages contrast k and q in words like Cahuilla (Uto-Aztecan)neki, "my house," versus neqi, "by myself." Vowel systems also vary considerably. Quite a few American Indian languageshave nasalized vowels. Nasalization is represented by a tilde symbol inChickasaw, for example. The use of pitch accent or tonal systems (as inChinese) to differentiate words is more common in the Americas than theuse of contrastive stress like that found, for example, in English import,pronounced im-port' as a verb and im'-port as a noun. Morphology and Syntax The most commonly cited trait of American Indian languages is polysynthesis--theexpression of complicated ideas within a single word containing many separatemeaningful elements, or morphemes. The use of verbs with attached subjectand object indicators (most often prefixes) is common; in many languagesadverbial and other elements may also be attached to the verb, formingcomplex single-word sentences, like the Lakota (Siouan) wica-yuzaza-ma-ya-khiya-pi-kte,"you all will make me wash them," which includes the componentmorphemes them + wash + me + you + make + plural + future. While most languages have accusative case systems like that of English(opposing grammatical categories of subject and object), active systemsin which the same morpheme is used to indicate the object of a transitiveverb and the subject of a stative verb are not uncommon. For example, theprefix ma-, "me" in the Lakota example just presented means "I"in a sentence like ma-s'amna, "I stink. " Many languages use unmarked verbs for the third person. Thus Chickasawhita can mean either "to dance" or "he dances." Possessiveand locational indicators are often attached to nouns, as in Yup'ik Eskimoanya-a-ni (boat + his + in), which means "in his boat." Genderdistinctions like those of the Indo-European languages are found in onlya few languages, such as Garifuna (Arawakan), in which halau, "chair,"is masculine, but muna, "house," feminine. More languages makea grammatically comparable distinction between animate, or living, andinanimate nouns. Alienable possession or ownership is often indicated differentlyfrom inalienable possession of items such as kinship terms and body parts.Reduplication--the doubling of all or part of a word, usually to indicateplurality or intensity--is common, as in Barbareno Chumash ma, "jackrabbit,"ma ma, "jackrabbits." The arrangement of words into sentences also varies from language tolanguage. While the most common basic word order is Subject-Object-Verb,Subject-Verb-Object is used in many languages, and the rarer word ordersVerb-Subject-Object, Verb-Object-Subject, and Object-Verb-Subject are alsofound. Many Native American Indian languages make use of special syntacticpatterns to distinguish among third-person participants in a sentence.Obviation (in the Algonquian languages) and the use of the so-called fourthperson (in Athabascan) allow one participant to be coded as more importantor interesting than another. Switch-reference is the name given to an unusualgrammatical device that allows a speaker to specify whether the subjectof one clause is the same as or different from that of another clause.The English sentence "he knows he's fat" is ambiguous. If thefirst "he" is known to refer to Tom, for instance, the sentencehas one meaning. If the second "he" also refers to Tom ("Tomis fat and he knows it") and another if the second "he"refers to, say, Bill ("Bill is fat and Tom knows it"). Althoughthe Mojave (Yuman) sentences isay-k suupaw-pc (fat + same know + perfective)and isay-m suupaw-pc (fat + different know + perfective) both translateas "he knows he's fat," they are not ambiguous: the first impliesthat the knower is fat, while the second means that someone else is. The Whorfian Hypothesis Because of different cultural needs, American Indian vocabulary structurevaries greatly, and some of the semantic concepts and sentence patternsoften seem unfamiliar to those who have not grown up speaking the languages.The American linguist Benjamin Lee WHORF argued that the differences insemantic and syntactic organization of languages as diverse as Englishand Hopi were correlated with differences in thought processes. The so-calledWhorfian (sometimes Whorf-Sapir) hypothesis that grammatical structurereflects cognitive structure is not widely accepted among linguists buthas been influential in other social sciences. LANGUAGE CONTACT Unrelated languages whose speakers are in daily contact often come toshare various grammatical traits, which can then be called areal featuresof the region. In the Pacific Northwest, for instance, there are severalunrelated genetic groups with strikingly similar, unusually complex consonantsystems. Many languages of the Tupian family of South America have nasalizationas an attribute, not just of vowels or consonants, but of whole syllables,and this feature has been borrowed by some unrelated neighboring languages.Loan words can reveal the prior history of a linguistic group. Alaskan languages and some as far south as California have Russian loans, for instance, dating from the time of extensive trade with Russia, and borrowings from Spanish are common throughout California, the Southwest, and, of course, Latin America. Borrowed words are often changed to fit the structure of the borrowing language--Spanish caballo ("horse") was borrowed into Tubatulabal (Uto-Aztecan) as kawaayu, for example, because all Tubatulabal words have final stress and the language has no bilabial v or b sound. Indian words have also been borrowed into English and and other European languages. The words moccasin, squash, squaw, and toboggan, like the majority of Indian loans into English, are from Algonquian languages; chocolate, from Aztec, tobacco, from Taino, and condor, from Quechua, are examples of words that were borrowed first into Spanish and then into English. The names of thousands of places throughout the Americas are of Indian origin. 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