Further, historians dispute the origins of these languages.
If the fi rst Americans arrived in North America by crossing a
land bridge between Siberia and Alaska—a theory that is not
universally accepted—and then over millennia migrated and
settled throughout North, Central, and South America, this
would suggest that American languages originated in Asia.
Comparing even one of the many Native American languages
with an ancient Asian language, however, is a process fraught
with diffi culties. Nonetheless, some language historians have
claimed to fi nd similarities between the structure of Pacifi c
Asian languages and that of one or more ancient American
languages, particularly those of northwestern North America.
Meanwhile, many historians remain convinced that the earli-
est people who settled in the modern-day southeastern United
States were of European origin, meaning that they imported
an entirely diff erent family of languages to the Americas.
A third diffi culty is assigning a language to a particular
geographic locale. When archaeologists do fi nd evidence of
an ancient language, the natural tendency is to conclude that
the language in question had been spoken in the place where
the evidence surfaced. However, such a conclusion is not
always defensible. Over time, as people moved about in the
ancient Americas, they took their languages with them. Th e
result was the blending of languages or, in the case of military
conquest, the replacement of languages. Upon encountering
each other through trade, people oft en borrowed words from
one another. Th ere is no way to “carbon-date” a language in
the same way that physical objects can be dated. Th e ongo-
ing swirl of peoples and languages over thousands of years
makes it nearly impossible to peg a particular language to a
particular place.
Th e fi nal diffi culty is the near-complete absence of writ-
ten records. Few of the languages of the Americas had a writ-
ten form until aft er Europeans arrived many centuries later.
Archaeologists have found glyphs, or written symbols, at sites
throughout the Americas, but attempting to reconstruct an
ex tinct la ng uage f rom t his sca nt ev idence is nea rly impossible.
In many cases the best linguists can do is to make inferences
on the basis of what they know about languages that survived
well past ancient times and perhaps into the modern world.
It is highly likely that language families developed in
the Americas by much the same process that occurred in
other parts of the world. Over time communities of speak-
ers dispersed throughout the Americas from the far northern
reaches of arctic North America to the woodlands of the east-
ern United States, the deserts of Central America and Mex-
ico, and eventually the southern tip of South America. Th ese
communities remained isolated from one another primarily
because of natural barriers such as mountain ranges, rivers,
and uninhabitable deserts. Communities themselves oft en
fractured as competition for food and other resources in-
creased, causing part of a community to break off and travel
in search of a new home. Th us, languages can be grouped into
families because at some time in the distant past, the speak-
ers’ ancestors spoke a common tongue, and many of these
commonalities were preserved over time. But over hundreds
of years and many generations, the language of each new
community evolved and changed, creating a new language
with roots in the more ancient tongue. Th at language would
have “cousins” that developed within other breakaway groups
from the common ancestral tongue.
A simple list of ancient American languages, oft en re-
ferred to as AmerInd languages (from American Indian), is
extensive. In the eastern half of the United States, for ex-
ample, was the Algonquian family of languages, consisting
of 33 or more languages, including those of the Arapaho,
Blackfoot, Ojibwe, and Shawnee. Another major family of
North American languages is referred to as either the Atha-
baskan or the Na-Dene languages, spoken from northwestern
Canada down to the Rio Grande. Th is family includes vari-
ous languages spoken by the Inuit as well as those spoken by
tribes in the Pacifi c Northwest, along the coast of California,
and in portions of the American Southwest.
Farther south the Hokan languages were spoken by com-
munities along the southwestern coast of the United States and
into northwestern Mexico. Th is family included some 28 dis-
tinct languages. Th e ancient Aztecs gave rise to two branches of
their language, northern and southern, with a total of about 31
languages. Th e northern group included the languages spoken
by the Hopi, the Paiute, the Shoshone, and the Comanche.
Th e Mayan languages of Central America have attracted
the particular interest of scholars, largely because Mayan
continues to be spoken by some six million people, primarily
in Mexico and Belize but also because of the existence of a
Mayan hieroglyphic script that dates back to the fi rst millen-
nium b.c.e. Th e spoken language descended from a language
referred to as Proto-Mayan, fi rst spoken about 5,000 years
ago. Th e language appears to have originated in the high-
lands of Guatemala, and it began to spread in roughly 2200
b.c.e. Th e family tree that descended from Proto-Mayan is
complex, consisting of four main branches, some of which in
turn gave rise to other branches that developed into separate
tongues. Scholars know of at least 31 and perhaps 33 distinct
Mayan languages.
In Central and South America at least 15 additional dis-
tinct language families have been identifi ed. Linguists have
identifi ed at least 17 additional South American languages
that they have not been able to classify. Making matters more
complicated is the fact that numerous languages from the
interior of South America are known to have existed and
perhaps survived but have not yet been named or identifi ed.
Some of these languages, not only in South America but also
in Central and North America, are known as isolates because
they have no known connection with other languages and
may have developed independently.See also climate and geography; drama and theater;
education; empires and dynasties; government orga-
nization; laws and legal codes; literature; migration
and population movements; religion and cosmology;620 language: The Americas