Native American Languages

I

Introduction

Native American Languages, indigenous languages of the native peoples of North, Middle, and South America. Scholars can only guess at the total number of languages once spoken by Native Americans; many of these languages disappeared before they could be documented. When Europeans arrived on the North American continent in the late 15th century, about 300 distinct languages were in use. Little more than half of these languages survive today and the number of languages continues to diminish as fewer and fewer children learn to speak them. In Middle America (Mexico and Central America) experts have identified approximately 300 languages, of which about half are still spoken. Only about 350 of an estimated 1,500 native languages in South America are still spoken. These, too, are disappearing rapidly.

II

Major Languages

Native American languages are spoken by far more people in Middle and South America than in North America. The languages most widely spoken belong to the Quechua family. About 8 million people, most of them in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, speak Quechuan languages. Another language in that region, Aymara, has about 2.2 million speakers. Guaraní is spoken by about 90 percent of Paraguay’s population, nearly 5 million people; it is also spoken in Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. Nahuatl has more than 1 million speakers, most of them in Mexico. Several Mayan languages spoken in southern Mexico and Central America have more than 500,000 speakers.

North American languages with the largest numbers of speakers include Navajo (150,000), Inuit (70,000), Ojibwa (45,000), Cree (35,000), Sioux (20,000), Choctaw (18,000), Central Alaskan Yupik (12,000), Tohono O’odham (12,000), and Creek (6,000). All of these languages are in danger of disappearing. Today the majority of North American languages are spoken primarily by elderly people, in some cases by no more than a handful.

III

Features of Native American Languages

Because of the great diversity of languages in the Americas there is great variety in their structure. Some have relatively few distinct sounds—Mohawk, a language of the Northeast in the United States, has just 15—whereas others have a great number—Tlingit, spoken in the Northwest, has 49. By comparison, American English has around 40.

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Many Native American languages have sets of sounds called ejectives or glottalized consonants, such as t’ and k’. Speakers pronounce ejectives by building up air pressure in the mouth and releasing the sounds with a pop. Some of the languages distinguish consonants pronounced with rounded lips from those formed with unrounded lips; for example, there are two kinds of k sounds. Many of the languages contain uvular sounds, which are produced farther back in the mouth than the English k. Other languages, particularly those in California, distinguish between ñ, pronounced nyuh and made with the tip of the tongue against the teeth, and Ñ, pronounced with the tongue farther back, as in the -ing in dancing. In some Native American languages, pronouncing a syllable in a higher or lower pitch can change the meaning of a word.

Prefixes (additions to the front of a word, as un in unkind) and suffixes (additions to the end of a word, as ment in arrangement) convey a variety of meanings in Native American languages. On the Pacific Coast many languages use prefixes to make elaborate distinctions pertaining to direction and location. Prefixes can carry such meanings as “inside,” “outside,” “into,” “through,” “upward,” “downward,” “uphill,” “downhill,” “upriver,” “downriver,” and even “emerging from woods” and “deep in the woods, not visible from the village.” Prefixes also can indicate the way in which something is done. For example, in Central Pomo, a language of California, different prefixes added to a verb can indicate how something is toppled: by kicking, pushing, sitting too close, jabbing or poking, or shooting at it. Other prefixes added to the verb topple have a less literal meaning. Adding a prefix that means “by soaring” indicates “to fly away,” “by biting” indicates “to overeat,” and “by speaking” indicates “to get the best of someone in an argument.”

Many Native American languages compose words out of several meaningful parts. For example, a speaker of Barbareño Chumash, a language of southern California, can convey “We will quietly lock them up” in a single, seven-part word. To a root word meaning “lock,” prefixes are added to indicate who is doing the locking up, how many are involved, that the action is to take place in the future, and that it is a small or quiet action. Suffixes indicate that the locking up affects someone as well as how many people it affects.

IV

Native American Writing Systems

Long before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, several hieroglyphic writing systems had developed in Middle America. These scripts, named for the groups who used them, include Aztec, Mixtec, Zapotec, Epi-Olmec, and Maya. Most of these writing systems used symbols to stand for whole words or word roots. Maya writing, however, is a mixed script in which rebuses augment symbols. In a rebus (a kind of pictorial pun) the sign for one word can represent another that sounds like it. In an English rebus, for example, a picture of an eye can stand for the pronoun I. In Maya, a depiction of a torch (tah) was used to represent the word ta, meaning “in” or “at.” From these rebuses phonetic signs developed to represent syllables made up of a consonant and a vowel. The hieroglyphic texts of Middle America largely relate histories of rulers and their births, offices, marriages, and deaths.

Writing systems for a number of Native American languages developed after the arrival of Europeans. Some of these are syllabaries, in which each symbol represents a syllable (typically a consonant and a vowel). The Cherokee leader Sequoyah developed a Cherokee syllabary in the early 19th century. Methodist missionary James Evans developed a Cree syllabary, used by Cree and Ojibwa speakers, in the late 1830s. An Eskimo syllabary, based on the Cree syllabary, is used by the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and Alaska. The Western Great Lakes syllabary, also called the Fox syllabary, is used by Fox, Sac (Sauk), Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Winnebago, and some Ojibwa speakers. Other systems are alphabetic, with separate letters for each consonant and each vowel.

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