American Indian languages, languages spoken by the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere and their modern descendants. The American Indian languages do not form a single historically interrelated stock (as do the Indo-European languages), nor are there any structural features (in phonetics, grammar, or vocabulary) whereby American Indian languages can be distinguished as a whole from languages spoken elsewhere.
In the pre-Columbian era, the American Indian languages covered both continents and the islands of the West Indies. There were, however, considerable differences in the distribution of the languages and language groups and in the size of the populations that spoke these languages.
In America north of Mexico, where the Indian population was thinly spread, there were a number of language groups—e.g., the Eskimo-Aleut, Algonquian, Athabascan, and Siouan—each of which covered large territories and included some 20 or more closely related idioms. Other language groups, however, were smaller and the areas containing them correspondingly more diverse in language. In California alone, for example, more than 20 distinct language groups were represented. These, according to Edward Sapir, exhibited greater and more numerous linguistic extremes than may be found in all of Europe. America north of Mexico, taken as a whole, had about 300 distinct languages, spoken by a population estimated at about 1.5 million.
Mesoamerica (Mexico and northern Central America) had a much larger Indian population—estimated at about 20 million—which spoke at least 80 languages. Some of these languages— e.g., Aztecan of central Mexico and the Maya languages of Yucatan and Guatemala—belonged to large and complexly organized empires and probably accounted for most of the native population. Others were far more restricted in area and numbers of speakers. The area of greatest linguistic diversity appears to have been in southern Mexico and the region now occupied by the northern Central American republics.
South America had an aboriginal population of between 10 million and 20 million and the greatest diversity of languages—more than 500 languages. Most of the population was in the Andean region, where there was also a powerful Indian empire, that of the Incas. Their Quechuan languages spread beyond their original homeland in the southern Peruvian highlands and resulted in the extinction or reduction of many other Indian tongues.
European conquest and colonization ultimately led to the disappearance of many American Indian language groups and to radical changes in the groups that survived. A number of languages have become extinct: in the West Indies the aboriginal languages have almost entirely disappeared, and in America north of Mexico one-third of the aboriginal languages have become extinct. The situation is somewhat different in Mesoamerica and South America. Although there are no precise figures, a greater number of languages are still spoken, some of them by large populations.
Of the American Indian languages still spoken, many have only a bare handful of speakers. In America north of Mexico, more than 50 percent of the surviving languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers each. In communities as small as these, most people are bilingual, and the younger people, educated in English, often have little more than a superficial command of the native idiom. In short, even though the Indian population north of Mexico is actually increasing, most of the aboriginal languages are slowly dying out. Only a few languages are flourishing: Navaho, spoken in New Mexico and Arizona; Ojibwa, in the northern United States and southern Canada; Cherokee, in Oklahoma and North Carolina; and Dakota-Assiniboin, in the northern portions of the midwestern United States. Bilingualism is common even in these groups.
In parts of South America and Mesoamerica there are still a number of widespread and flourishing language groups. Quechuan is one of these: it is estimated that this group of closely related dialects has several million speakers in Ecuador, Peru, and parts of Bolivia and Argentina. One of these extant languages, the dialect of Cuzco, Peru, was the principal language of the Inca empire. The Indians of Mexico and Central America also still speak languages that date to the time of the Spanish conquest: Uto-Aztecan, a group of languages in central and parts of southern Mexico; the Maya languages, spoken in Yucatan, Guatemala, and adjacent territories; and Oto-Manguean, of central Mexico. All three of these were languages of Indian empires before 1500, and both the Maya and Aztec peoples had writing systems.
The Tupí-Guaraní languages, spoken in eastern Brazil and in Paraguay, constitute a major pre-Columbian language group that has survived into modern times. Before the arrival of the Europeans, languages of this group were spoken by a large and widespread population. Tupí of Brazil became, after the conquest, the basis of a língua-geral, the medium of communication for Europeans and Indians throughout the Amazonian region. Guaraní similarly became a general language for much of Paraguay. Tupí was, by the early 21st century, gradually being replaced by Portuguese, but Guaraní remained an important second language of modern Paraguay, and an extensive folk literature has been created.