At the time of first European contact, probably close to 1,000 American Indian languages were spoken in North, Central, and South America. Although the number of languages in daily use has steadily declined because of persecution and pressures on the Indians to adopt English, Spanish, and other originally European languages, well over 700 different American Indian--or, as they are sometimes called, Amerindian or Native American--languages are spoken today. SCIENTIFIC STUDY American Indian languages have long been a source of fascination for scholars and lay people alike. The only transcriptions of many now-extinct languages were made by interested soldiers and explorers untrained in phonetics; in areas of Spanish domination, the careful records of Catholic missionaries provide invaluable documentation of the way indigenous languages were spoken as long as 400 years ago. In the United States many of the most famous linguists of the early 20th century--among them Franz BOAS, Leonard BLOOMFIELD, and Edward SAPIR--transcribed and analyzed North American Indian languages. Many descriptions of Indian languages are important in the literature of the linguistic school known as American structuralism. Today interest in American Indian languages is increasing, and Americanists, as those who study the languages are called, hold regular scientific meetings to report on their investigations. Current research on the native languages of the Americas is published in several periodicals, notably the International Journal of American Linguistics. ORIGINS AND CLASSIFICATION Most scholars believe that the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas migrated from Asia many thousands of years ago. Acceptance of this theory has led some to hypothesize that all Indian languages can be traced back to a single remote ancestor language. The great diversity of Indian languages, however, has thus far prevented proof of common origin, and most Americanists favor more conservative classifications of the languages into a number of distinct groups. American Indian Historical Linguistics Few American Indian languages have more than 100 years of written history; therefore, comparative study must be based upon quite recent sources. Following the traditional principles of historical linguistics, words from Indian languages believed to be related are subjected to minute comparison, in a search for regular correspondences of sound and meaning. Regularity is the key: thus, while Luiseno paa-la, Papago wa-, and Aztec a-tl, all meaning "water," do not immediately appear similar, the words are seen to be cognate (derived from the same word in the ancestor language) when other sets such as Luiseno pe-t, Papago woog, and Aztec o-tli, all meaning "road," are considered, since Luiseno initial p and Papago initial w regularly correspond to the lack of any initial consonant sound in Aztec. When such correspondences are discovered, the languages being compared are judged to have a historical connection, either genetic--because of descent 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 macrophyla or superstocks. On the basis of the Luiseno, Papago, and Aztec words cited above, linguists have proposed the reconstruction of initial p sound in the words for "water" and "road" in the Proto-Uto-Aztecan ancestor of the three languages in question. The sounds systems and vocabulary of the ancestors of a number of different American Indian language families have been partially reconstructed through similarly detailed analysis by linguists. Comparison of these reconstructed protolanguages leads to more informed conjecture about earlier connections between the ancestor languages and the peoples who spoke them. Language Names Names for American Indian languages can be confusing. Some names are chosen politically rather than linguistically: for instance, Creek and Seminole are mutually intelligible Muskogean languages but are traditionally treated as separate because the tribes who use them are different. Many American Indian groups do not have a special name for themselves other than the word for "people." Often Indian groups come to be known by a foreign term, such as the English names Dogrib and Yellowknife for Athabascan tribes in the Northwest or the naming of most Coastal California languages for the nearest Spanish mission (Luiseno was the Uto-Aztecan language spoken around Mission San Luis Rey, for example, and the Chumash language Obispeno was named for Mission San Luis Obispo). Some other designations, occasionally derogatory, originated with other Indians--the name Comanche, for example, is from Southern 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 Yuman family, for example, is named for the language Yuma. North American Languages Perhaps 300 languages were spoken in North America when the first Europeans arrived, and about 200 are still spoken by some 300,000 people. The American explorer and ethnologist John Wesley POWELL presented the first comprehensive classification of the languages north of Mexico in 1891, dividing them into 58 families. Various scholars have subsequently proposed 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 classification of American Indian languages, grouping most of the languages of the United States and Canada into seven macrophyla, with a few families and language isolates 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 connection with a non- American language group. Central American Languages Recent estimates place the number of Central American Indian languages at about 70, with at least 5 million speakers. Of course, language boundaries and political boundaries do not coincide. The Hokan and Aztec-Tanoan phyla of North America also include a number of Central or Meso-American languages, and some South American groups have outlying representatives in Central America. Many of the groupings in Table 2 are still highly controversial. South American Languages Linguistic diversity is greatest in South America, where many languages spoken in remote jungle and mountain regions remain unrecorded and unclassified. There are probably over 500 different languages still spoken, with perhaps 14 million speakers. The various languages of the Quechua group alone have 5 million speakers. Broader classifications of the more than 80 South American language families (Table 3) into a smaller number of macrophyla have been proposed by Joseph Greenberg, Morris Swadesh, Cestmir Loukotka, and others. Because these South American stocks have not as yet been fully documented with lists of cognate sets, they are not accepted by all specialists. Recent Controversy Current scholarly approaches to American Indian language classification are polarized. Most Americanists accept only certain parts of the Voegelin classification, while rejecting others, with the Macro-Penutian and Hokan phyla of North America receiving most challenges. Joseph Greenberg recently proposed a new classification, with just three groups of languages: Eskimo- Aleut, Na-Dene, and a third stock, Amerind, which includes all the other languages of North, Central, and South America. Although some mainstream Americanists find this proposal intriguing, they have criticized Greenberg's research for its methodology and data, and the theory is not widely accepted. GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE The grammatical structure--phonology, or sound system; morphology, or word structure; and syntax, or sentence structure--of American Indian languages varies considerably, but none of the languages can be called primitive. Phonology Though some Indian languages have a simple phonological structure (the Arawakan language Campa, for instance, has only 17 contrastive speech sounds, or phonemes), the phonology of others is very complex. Certain sounds, many of which are articulated toward the back of the vocal tract, have been cited as characteristic of the American Indian languages, but none of these occur in all the languages. The glottal stop, made by briefly closing the vocal cords, as in the middle of the English word uh-oh, is a common sound. Many languages have glottalized consonants, made with a glottal stop produced simultaneously with another consonant sound. For instance, Navajo ts'in, meaning "bone," has a glottalized ts sound (represented by ts'), while tsin, "tree" has a plain ts. Another common sound is a back k sound, normally written q, articulated not at the velum, as is English k, but rather in the postvelar or uvular region. 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 languages have nasalized vowels. Nasalization is represented by a tilde symbol in Chickasaw, for example. The use of pitch accent or tonal systems (as in Chinese) to differentiate words is more common in the Americas than the use 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--the expression of complicated ideas within a single word containing many separate meaningful elements, or morphemes. The use of verbs with attached subject and object indicators (most often prefixes) is common; in many languages adverbial and other elements may also be attached to the verb, forming complex single-word sentences, like the Lakota (Siouan) wica-yuzaza-ma-ya-khiya-pi-kte, "you all will make me wash them," which includes the component morphemes 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 systems in which the same morpheme is used to indicate the object of a transitive verb and the subject of a stative verb are not uncommon. For example, the prefix 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 Chickasaw hita can mean either "to dance" or "he dances." Possessive and locational indicators are often attached to nouns, as in Yup'ik Eskimo anya-a-ni (boat + his + in), which means "in his boat." Gender distinctions like those of the Indo-European languages are found in only a few languages, such as Garifuna (Arawakan), in which halau, "chair," is masculine, but muna, "house," feminine. More languages make a grammatically comparable distinction between animate, or living, and inanimate nouns. Alienable possession or ownership is often indicated differently from inalienable possession of items such as kinship terms and body parts. Reduplication--the doubling of all or part of a word, usually to indicate plurality or intensity--is common, as in Barbareno Chumash ma, "jackrabbit," ma ma, "jackrabbits." The arrangement of words into sentences also varies from language to language. While the most common basic word order is Subject- Object-Verb, Subject-Verb-Object is used in many languages, and the rarer word orders Verb-Subject-Object, Verb-Object-Subject, and Object-Verb-Subject are also found. Many American Indian languages make use of special syntactic patterns to distinguish among third-person participants in a sentence. Obviation (in the Algonquian languages) and the use of the so-called fourth person (in Athabascan) allow one participant to be coded as more important or interesting than another. Switch-reference is the name given to an unusual grammatical device that allows a speaker to specify whether the subject of one clause is the same as or different from that of another clause. The English sentence "he knows he's fat" is ambiguous. If the first "he" is known to refer to Tom, for instance, the sentence has one meaning. If the second "he" also refers to Tom ("Tom is fat and he knows it") and another if the second "he" refers to, say, Bill ("Bill is fat and Tom knows it"). Although the Mojave (Yuman) sentences isay-k suupaw-pc (fat + same know + perfective) and isay-m suupaw-pc (fat + different know + perfective) both translate as "he knows he's fat," they are not ambiguous: the first implies that the knower is fat, while the second means that someone else is. The Whorfian Hypothesis Because of different cultural needs, American Indian vocabulary structure varies greatly, and some of the semantic concepts and sentence patterns often seem unfamiliar to those who have not grown up speaking the languages. The American linguist Benjamin Lee WHORF argued that the differences in semantic and syntactic organization of languages as diverse as English and Hopi were correlated with differences in thought processes. The so-called Whorfian (sometimes Whorf-Sapir) hypothesis that grammatical structure reflects cognitive structure is not widely accepted among linguists but has been influential in other social sciences. LANGUAGE CONTACT Unrelated languages whose speakers are in daily contact often come to share various grammatical traits, which can then be called areal features of the region. In the Pacific Northwest, for instance, there are several unrelated genetic groups with strikingly similar, unusually complex consonant systems. Many languages of the Tupian family of South America have nasalization as an attribute, not just of vowels or consonants, but of whole syllables, and this feature has been borrowed by some unrelated neighboring languages. Loanwords 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 (an extinct Arawakan language), 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. WRITING SYSTEMS The Mayan hieroglyphic system, which has not yet been fully deciphered, was the only well-developed writing system in use in the Americas before European contact, although a number of the Central American civilizations and the Quechua used pictographic systems, primarily for religious purposes, and other groups made nonlinguistic petroglyphs. Most Indian writing systems now in use were developed by linguists or missionaries: one exception is the syllabary devised by the Cherokee SEQUOYA, which is still in use. Most languages, however, do not yet have standard orthographies. THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES Many American Indian languages have few speakers and are in danger of extinction, but some are increasing in both influence and number of speakers. Two nations, Greenland and Paraguay, use American Indian languages--Greenlandic Eskimo and Guarani (Tupian)--officially. Preschool programs, bilingual elementary instruction, and college-level courses are offered in some languages. A recent resurgence of interest by North American Indians in their cultural heritage has led to the training of Indian linguists and to courses in Indian languages for older children and adults. Such programs may lead to the preservation of some threatened languages. History of the United States, By George Bancroft, Vol.2, Pg.101-3) "Native American Langauge" The American savage has tongue and palate and lips and throat; the power to utter flowing sounds, the power to hiss: hence the primitive sounds are essentially the same, and may almost all be expressed by the alphabet of European use. The tribes vary in their choice of sounds: the Oneidas always changed the letter r; the Algonkins have no f; the Iroquois family never use the semivowel m, or the labials. The Cherokees are destitute of the labials, but employ the semivowels. Of the several dialects of the Iroquois, that of the Oneidas is the most soft, being the only one that admits the letter l; that of the Senecas is rudest and most energetic. The Algonkin dialects, especially those of the Abenakis, heap up consonants with prodigal harshness; the Iroquois abound in a concurrence of vowels; in the Cherokee, every syllable ends with a vowel. But before acquaintance with Europeans, no one of them had discriminated the sounds which he articulated: east of the Mississippi there was no alphabet; and the only mode of writing was by rude imitations and symbols. The Indian does not separate the parts of speech from one another; he expresses a complex idea by grouping its separate elements together in one conglomerate word. The rude process is not a perfect synthesis, as in the conjugation of a Latin verb. It has with greater exactness been said of the red man, that he glues together the words expressing subject and object and number and person and case and time, and yet many more relations. This is the distinguishing mark of American speech; it pervaded the dialects of the Iroquois, of the Algonkin, and the Cherokee. When a new object was presented to an Indian, he would inquire its use and form for it a name which might include within itself an entire definition. So when Eliot, in his version of the Bible, translated kneeling, the word which he was compelled to frame was of eleven syllables. Of the savage, license to gratify his animal instincts seemed the system of morals. The idea of chastity as a social duty was but feebly developed. And yet, wrote Roger Williams, "God hath planted in the hearts of the wildest of the sonnes of men a high and honorable esteem of the marriage-bed, insomuch that they universally submit unto it, and hold its violation abominable." Neither might marriages be contracted between kindred of near degree; the Iroquois might choose a wife of the same tribe with himself, but not of the same cabin; the Algonkin must look beyond those who used the same family symbol; the Cherokee would at one and the same time marry a mother and her daughter, but would never marry his own immediate kindred. Source & Reference Notes! File: NA_VOL02.TXT Revised: Jan. 15, 1995 By: Paul R. Sarrett, Jr. [email protected] End of File!
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