Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language isolates and unclassified languages. Many proposals to group these into higher-level families have been made, such as in three macrofamilies of Eskimo–Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind, though this scheme is rejected by nearly all specialists. According to UNESCO, most of the indigenous American languages in North America are critically endangered, and many of them are already extinct. The most widely spoken indigenous language is Southern Quechua, with about 6 to 7 million speakers.
Read more about Indigenous Languages Of The Americas: Background, Origins, Language Families and Isolates, Language Stock Proposals, Unattested Languages, Pidgins and Mixed Languages
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“What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The trouble with foreign languages is, you have to think before your speak.”
—Swedish proverb, trans. by Verne Moberg.
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—D.H. (David Herbert)