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Native American languages are the indigenous languages of the Americas, spoken from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America. The Native American languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language isolates; proposals to group these into higher-level families have been made by some linguists, but are not generally accepted.Archeological and DNA evidence suggests that the Americas were peopled by migrants from Siberia about 13,000 years ago. From Alaska, the descendants of those first migrants went on to people the rest of North and South America. The language spoken by these early migrants, and the process by which the current diversity of Native American languages emerged, are a matter of speculation. Some evidence suggests that the ancestors of the Na-Dene- and Inuit-Aleut-speakers arrived separately from Siberia some time after the earliest settlers.
Several Native American languages developed their own writing systems, including the Mayan languages and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. These and many other Native American languages later adapted the Roman alphabet. Aleut was first transliterated into the Cyrillic Alphabet, and later into the Roman alphabet.
Subsequent to the arrival of Christopher ColumbusChristopher Columbus ( 1451 1— May 20, 1506) was an explorer and trader who crossed the Atlantic Ocean and reached the Americas in 1492 under the flag of Castilian Spain. He believed that the earth was a relatively small sphere, and argued that a ship cou in the Americas in 1492, SpanishThis article is about the international language known as Spanish. For other languages spoken in Spain see Languages of Spain Spanish is an Iberian Romance language, and the third or fourth most spoken language in the world. It is spoken as a first langua, EnglishThe English language is a West Germanic language, originating from England. It is the third most common "first" language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the mil, PortuguesePortuguese portugues is a Romance language predominantly spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and East Timor. With more than 200 million native speakers, Portuguese is one of the few languages spoken in such widely-distributed parts, FrenchFrench le francais la langue francaise is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered only by Spanish and Portuguese. French is the 11th most spoken language in the world, spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother to, and DutchDutch is a West Germanic language spoken worldwide by around 21 million people. The variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium is also informally called Flemish . The Dutch name for the language is Nederlands or less formal Hollands and Dutch is sometimes called were brought to the Americas by European settlers and administrators, and constitute the official languages of the independent states of the Americas, although Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru have one or more Native American languages as an official language in addition to Spanish. Several indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas from European languages.
The attitudes of the most of the european colonizers and their successor states toward Native American languages ranged from benign neglect to active supression.
However, the Spanish missionaries preached the natives in local languages. They actually spread Quechua beyond its original geographic area. Native American languages vary greatly in the number of speakers, from Quechua and Aymara with millions of active speakers to a number of languages with only a handful of elderly speakers. Many Native American languages are endangered, and many others are extinct, with no living native speakers.
