Indigenous languages of the Americas

Indigenous languages of the Americas are languages historically spoken by Indigenous peoples across North, Central, and South America, many of which remain in use today.

Language family: A group of languages descended from a common ancestral language. Most Indigenous languages of the Americas belong to families whose histories cross present-day borders.
Nahuatl: A Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Mexico, with a long history in central Mexico. Its historical and modern forms illustrate continuity through conquest and social change.
Peopling of the Americas: The migration and settlement of human populations across the Americas in prehistory. The initial settlement provides the broadest context for the continent’s linguistic diversity.
Spanish colonization of the Americas: The conquest and settlement of much of the Americas by Spain beginning in the late fifteenth century. Spanish rule altered language ecologies through missionization, administration, and demographic upheaval.
Amerind hypothesis: A proposal by Joseph Greenberg grouping most Indigenous languages of the Americas into one macrofamily. Its sweeping classification remains disputed because its evidence and methods are contested.
Linguistic area: A region where unrelated languages share features through prolonged contact. Shared structures can reflect contact rather than common ancestry among American languages.
Mayan languages: A family of languages spoken chiefly in Mesoamerica, including K’iche’ and Yucatec Maya. Their long written and spoken histories span precolonial and contemporary societies.
Proto-language: A reconstructed ancestral language from which a language family’s members descended. Comparative linguists infer ancestral languages to trace family histories beyond written evidence.
Doctrine of discovery: A set of legal and religious ideas used by European powers to justify claims to Indigenous lands. Its colonial framework accompanied institutions that restricted Indigenous languages and cultures.
Na-Dene languages: A language family that includes Tlingit, Eyak, and the Athabaskan languages. Its deeper relationship to languages in Siberia has been proposed but remains debated.

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