How many native American languages are there?
30 June 2005
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A surprising number of people think there's just one language native to the U.S.: "Indian". Nothing could be further from the truth.
[Mohawk sound clip]
You've just heard a greeting in a language spoken here for centuries before the Pilgrims landed on the continent: It's Mohawk, one of nearly 300 languages that we know were spoken north of Mexico before the arrival of Europeans. Many have disappeared, but there are still about 180 of them. They're not demonstrably related to Indo-European, or any other large language family. They constitute between 50 and 60 different families of their own -- and the languages are as different from each other as English is from Arabic or Japanese.
Some of the language families are quite large. The Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family, for example, contains 39 different languages, spoken from Alaska through western Canada into Oregon, California, and the Southwest. It includes Navajo, with about 80,000 speakers, the most of any indigenous language in the country.
A family called Algic is best known for its largest branch: Algonquian, spoken along the Atlantic seaboard from Labrador to Virginia. It was Algonquian speakers who met the Pilgrims and Sir Walter Raleigh, and gave us words such as caribou, skunk, moccasin, hominy, and raccoon. Algonquian languages are also spoken across most of Canada and down to the Plains in the U.S Midwest: languages like Shawnee, Fox, Potawatomi, Cree, Cheyenne, and Blackfoot.
Mohawk, the language you heard earlier, is a member of the Iroquoian family. It's still spoken in Quebec, Ontario, and New York State. One of its relatives is Cherokee, which in the 17th century, was spoken in the southern Appalachians. Like several other indigenous peoples, the Cherokee were forced to march westward in 1838-9 along the so-called "Trail of Tears," so the largest Cherokee community is now in Oklahoma. Iroquoian languages gave us place names like Schenectady, Ontario, Ohio, and Kentucky, as well as Canada.
These languages are so diverse, it's hard to make generalizations about them. But they're far from being simple, or "primitive." In fact, their grammars are very complex. If you saw the movie Windtalkers, for example, you know that speakers of Navajo used their language as a secret code to baffle the Japanese in World War II.
Some of the languages have sounds that are unusual to English speakers, such as popping sounds in the back of the throat. Some have distinctive tone, so that the pitch of the voice on a syllable can completely change the meaning of a word. Navajo has both of these.
And words can sometimes be very long, carrying as much meaning as a complete sentence in English.
Each of the languages shows us a unique way of looking at the world, of packaging experience into words, of making subtle distinctions. If you speak an Eskimoan language, for example, and you want to say 'that caribou', there's no single word equivalent to English 'that'. You first have to notice whether the caribou is standing or moving. If it's stationary, you have to specify whether it's visible or out of sight. If you can see it, you must specify whether it's near you, near the person you're talking to, or far away. Or that it's above or below you. Or that it's approaching, or that it's the same caribou you were talking about earlier. Each of these ideas is packaged in just one word -- translated simply 'that' in English.
Unfortunately, we're losing the melodies and the unique perspective of our aboriginal tongues. The languages are dying. Some disappeared because their speakers perished in warfare or epidemics. Others because their speakers chose to use other languages instead. It's likely that no more than a dozen of the languages will survive this century. And like an environmental disaster, it will be a great loss. Our lives are richer because we have them.
That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Dr. Marianne Mithun, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.