Urheimat - Languages Spoken Predominantly in North and South America - Other Groups

Other Groups

Further information: Models of migration to the New World

Other than Dene-Yeniseian, and a possible connection between the Eskimo-Aleut language family and the Uralic language family, no proposals of genetic relations between languages of North or South America and languages of Eurasia, Africa, or other parts of the world, have been backed by credible evidence. There is not, for example, any indication that the Vikings who had a brief presence in North America around 1000 CE left any linguistic trace.

Population genetic evidence suggests that the non-circumpolar indigenous peoples of the Americas have origins in a small common founder population in the Upper Paleolithic era that arrived via a Berginian land bridge from Asia. This population genetic data point suggests the possibility that all indigenous Native American languages of non-circumpolar indigenous Americans (i.e. neither Inuit-Aleut nor Na-Dene) have genetic origins in a single language of the founding population of the Americas, and hence, as controversially proposed by Greenberg, that they all ultimately belong to the same linguistic superfamily, which Greenberg called Amerind. But, there is not clear evidence of this from efforts to use traditional comparative linguistic methods to classify indigenous Native American languages. The process of identifying linguistic origins with traditional linguistic methods begins with the process of classifying languages into families.

In general, more progress has been made in identify linguistic family relationships in North America, where the just under three hundred attested languages are grouped into twenty-nine language families and twenty-seven language isolates (some of which are simply incapable of being classified because they are extinct and were not sufficiently well attested to classify). Two (super-) family proposals, Penutian and Hokan generally along the Pacific coast of North America that are gaining currency among linguists, would reduce the number of language families in North America to about fifteen. However, in large portions of the Southeast United States where it is known that there was considerable pre-Columbian linguistic diversity, there are no attested indigenous languages and the populations in question either left no survivors, or all remaining speakers of relocated tribes with diminished numbers underwent language shift as their ancestral languages became moribund.

Mesoamerica was home to one of the most developed succession of farming societies in the Americas in the pre-Columbian era. Mesoamerica's attested languages are likewise quite well systematized into six main language families and four other language isolates or small language families, as well as a few unclassified extinct languages, encompassing all of the languages in the region. Mesoamerica is also the only part of the Americas in which written languages were in use in the pre-Columbian era.

In South America there are about 350 living indigenous languages (in addition to many creoles) and an estimated more than one thousand extinct languages, grouped into more than 140 categories, only ten of which have more than five languages which have been demonstrated to belong to the same language family. This is about three times as much linguistic diversity at the language family/language isolate level as North America and Mesoamerica combined. The naïve expectation from population genetics would have been that there would be less linguistic diversity, because the entire indigenous population of South America appears to derive genetically from only a subset of an already small indigenous founder population of the Americas as a whole, something illustrated, for example, by its lack several of the less common genetic haplotypes found in indigenous America outside South America (although genetic diversity has accumulated in these populations over time through mutations distinguishing these populations from the founder population genomes). Some of the lack of classification of indigenous South American languages may be simply attributable to the small number of linguists devoted to the task and the limited amount of information available about many of the languages. But the languages of the region may also simply be particularly diverse due to separation by great time depth and geographic isolation. The only other place in the world with comparable linguistic diversity that has not been reduced to a small number of language families is Papua New Guinea, which also experienced many millennia of isolation from the rest of the world that ended only relatively recently.