Indigenous Languages of The Americas - Background

Background

Thousands of languages were spoken in North and South America prior to first contact with Europeans between the beginning of the 11th century (Norwegian settlement of Greenland and attempted settlement of Labrador and Newfoundland) and the end of the 15th century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus). Several indigenous cultures of the Americas had also developed their own writing systems, most famously the Mayan. The indigenous languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from the Quechua languages, Aymara, Guarani, and Nahuatl, which had millions of active speakers, to many languages with only several hundred speakers. After pre-Columbian times, several indigenous creole languages also developed in the Americas from European, indigenous and African languages.

The European colonizers and their successor states had widely varying attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars actively learned and promoted the Tupi language. In many Latin American colonies, Spanish missionaries often learned local languages in order to preach to the natives in their own tongue. In the American colonies, John Eliot of Massachusetts translated the Bible into the Massachusett language, also called Wampanoag, or Natick (1661–1663; he published the first Bible printed in North America). The Europeans also actively suppressed indigenous American languages. As a result, indigenous American languages suffered from cultural suppression and loss of speakers. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch, brought to the Americas by European settlers and administrators, had become the official or national languages of modern nation-states of the Americas.

Today, although many indigenous languages have become critically endangered, others are now rigorously spoken. Several even have official status, such as Guaraní in Paraguay. In other cases official status is limited to certain regions where the languages are spoken, and even if enshrined in constitutions, they may have infrequent de facto official use: examples of this are the status of Quechua in Peru and Aymara in Bolivia, where in practice, Spanish is dominant in all formal contexts. In the Arctic region, Greenland in 2009 adopted Kalaallisut as its sole official language. In the United States, the Navajo language is the most spoken Native American language, with over 200,000 speakers in the Southwestern United States. The language was used by the Navajo Code Talkers during World War II to transmit secret US military messages, which neither the Germans nor Japanese ever deciphered. Today, governments, universities, and indigenous peoples are continuing to work for the preservation and revitalization of indigenous American languages.