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28-635: The Algic languages (also Algonquian–Wiyot–Yurok or Algonquian–Ritwan) are an indigenous language family of North America . Most Algic languages belong to the Algonquian subfamily, dispersed over a broad area from the Rocky Mountains to Atlantic Canada . The other Algic languages are the Yurok and Wiyot of northwestern California , which, despite their geographic proximity, are not closely related. All these languages descend from Proto-Algic ,

56-429: A Dios ) Mexico Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto) , Mexico Belize North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region , Nicaragua Honduras ( Atlántida , Colón , Gracias a Dios ) United States Northwest Territories , Canada Mexico Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community , United States Mexico Unclassified language A supposedly unclassified language may turn out not to be

84-755: A failure to distinguish cognation , contact , and coincidence. According to UNESCO , most of the Indigenous languages of the Americas are critically endangered, and many are dormant (without native speakers but with a community of heritage-language users) or entirely extinct. The most widely spoken Indigenous languages are Southern Quechua (spoken primarily in southern Peru and Bolivia) and Guarani (centered in Paraguay, where it shares national language status with Spanish), with perhaps six or seven million speakers apiece (including many of European descent in

112-416: A family consists of many similar languages with great degree of confusing contact, a large number of languages may be effectively unclassified in this manner. Families where this is a substantial problem include Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu , Pama–Nyungan , and Arawakan . There are hundreds of unclassified languages, most of them extinct, although there are some, albeit relatively few, that are still spoken; in

140-454: A hundred or so language families and isolates , as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified due to the lack of information on them. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most widely reported is Joseph Greenberg 's Amerind hypothesis, which, however, nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and

168-465: A language at all, or even a distinct dialect, but merely a family, tribal or village name, or an alternative name for a people or language that is classified. If a language's genetic relationship has not been established after significant documentation of the language and comparison with other languages and families, as in the case of Basque in Europe, it is considered a language isolate – that is, it

196-495: A language isolate, or perhaps a member of some other family related to Maban in the proposed but as yet undemonstrated Nilo-Saharan phylum. It would be easier to address the problem with better data, but no-one has been able to find speakers of the language again. It also happens that a language may be unclassified within an established family. That is, it may be obvious that it is, say, a Malayo-Polynesian language , but not clear in which branch of Malayo-Polynesian it belongs. When

224-533: A language that has caused multiple problems for classification is Mimi of Decorse in Chad . This language is only attested in a single word list collected ca. 1900. At first it was thought to be a Maban language , because of similarities to Maba , the first Maban language to be described. However, as other languages of the Maban family were described, it became clear that the similarities were solely with Maba itself, and

252-542: A second-order proto-language estimated to have been spoken about 7,000 years ago and reconstructed using the reconstructed Proto-Algonquian language and the Wiyot and Yurok languages. The term Algic was first coined by Henry Schoolcraft in his Algic Researches , published in 1839. Schoolcraft defined the term as "derived from the words Allegheny and Atlantic , in reference to the indigenous people anciently located in this geographical area." Schoolcraft's terminology

280-436: Is classified as a language family of its own. An 'unclassified' language therefore is one which may still turn out to belong to an established family once better data is available or more thorough comparative research is done. Extinct unclassified languages for which little evidence has been preserved are likely to remain in limbo indefinitely, unless lost documents or a surviving speaking population are discovered. An example of

308-604: Is limited to certain regions where the languages are most spoken. Although sometimes enshrined in constitutions as official, the languages may be used infrequently in de facto official use. Examples are Quechua in Peru and Aymara in Bolivia, where in practice, Spanish is dominant in all formal contexts. In the North American Arctic region, Greenland in 2009 elected Kalaallisut as its sole official language. In

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336-725: Is thought to have been located in the Northwestern United States somewhere between the suspected homeland of the Algonquian branch (to the west of Lake Superior according to Ives Goddard ) and the earliest known location of the Wiyot and Yurok (along the middle Columbia River according to Whistler). The genetic relation of Wiyot and Yurok to Algonquian was first proposed by Edward Sapir (1913, 1915, 1923), and argued against by Algonquianist Truman Michelson (1914, 1914, 1935). According to Lyle Campbell (1997),

364-518: The Quechuan 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 developed in the Americas, based on European, Indigenous and African languages. The European colonizing nations and their successor states had widely varying attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars learned and promoted

392-787: The Tupi language . In many Spanish colonies, Spanish missionaries often learned local languages and culture in order to preach to the natives in their own tongue and relate the Christian message to their Indigenous religions. In the British American colonies, John Eliot of the Massachusetts Bay Colony translated the Bible into the Massachusett language , also called Wampanoag, or Natick (1661–1663); he published

420-573: The Wakashan languages . Indigenous languages of America#Northern America The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples . Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct . The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other; instead, they are classified into

448-561: The 11th century (with the Nordic settlement of Greenland and failed efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador ) 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 , the best known being the Maya script . The Indigenous languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from

476-461: The 2010 census. In Canada, 133,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in the 2011 census. In Greenland, about 90% of the population speaks Greenlandic , the most widely spoken Eskaleut language . Over a thousand known languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of

504-489: The Americas by European settlers and administrators, had become the official or national languages of modern nation-states of the Americas. Many Indigenous languages have become critically endangered, but others are vigorous and part of daily life for millions of people. Several Indigenous languages have been given official status in the countries where they occur, such as Guaraní in Paraguay . In other cases official status

532-1166: The Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages. The first Commissioner of Indigenous languages in Canada is Ronald E. Ignace . Colombia Colombia delegates local Indigenous language recognition to the department level according to the Colombian Constitution of 1991 . Bolivia Corrientes , Argentina Tacuru , Mato Grosso do Sul , Brazil Mercosur Peru (Official Language) Jujuy , Argentina Comunidad Andina Peru (Official Language) Comunidad Andina Belize Mexico Mexico Belize Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Colombia ( Cauca , Nariño , Putumayo ) La Guajira , Colombia Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto) , Mexico Mexico Honduras ( Gracias

560-669: The United States, the Navajo language is the most spoken Native American language, with more than 200,000 speakers in the Southwestern United States . The US Marine Corps recruited Navajo men, who were established as code talkers during World War II. In American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America (1997), Lyle Campbell lists several hypotheses for the historical origins of Amerindian languages. Roger Blench (2008) has advocated

588-489: The case of Guarani). Only half a dozen others have more than a million speakers; these are Aymara of Bolivia and Nahuatl of Mexico, with almost two million each; the Mayan languages Kekchi , Quiché , and Yucatec of Guatemala and Mexico, with about 1 million apiece; and perhaps one or two additional Quechuan languages in Peru and Ecuador. In the United States, 372,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in

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616-615: The first Bible printed in North America, the Eliot Indian Bible . The Europeans also suppressed use of Indigenous languages, establishing their own languages for official communications, destroying texts in other languages, and insisted that Indigenous people learn European languages in schools. As a result, Indigenous languages suffered from cultural suppression and loss of speakers. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch, brought to

644-432: The following list, the extinct languages are labeled with a dagger (†). These languages are unclassifiable, not just unclassified, because while there may be record of a language existing there may not be enough materials in it to analyze and classify, especially with now-extinct languages. (See, for example, a list of unclassified languages of South America .) Many of these languages are also considered unclassifiable, as

672-468: The relationship "has subsequently been demonstrated to the satisfaction of all." This controversy in the early classification of North American languages was called the "Ritwan controversy" because Wiyot and Yurok were assigned to a genetic grouping called "Ritwan." Most specialists now reject the validity of the Ritwan genetic node. Berman (1982) suggested that Wiyot and Yurok share sound changes not shared by

700-455: The relationship was too distant for Mimi to be related specifically to Maba and not equally to the other Maban languages. The obvious similarities are therefore now thought to be due to borrowings from Maba, which is the socially dominant language in the area. When such loans are discounted, there is much less data to classify Mimi with, and what does remain is not particularly similar to any other language or language family. Mimi might therefore be

728-568: The rest of Algic (which would be explainable by either areal diffusion or genetic relatedness); Proulx (2004) argued against Berman's conclusion of common sound changes. More recently, Sergei Nikolaev has argued in two papers for a systematic relationship between the Nivkh language of Sakhalin and the Amur river basin and the Algic languages, and a secondary relationship between these two together and

756-663: The theory of multiple migrations along the Pacific coast of peoples from northeastern Asia, who already spoke diverse languages. These proliferated in the New World. Countries like Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Guyana recognize most Indigenous languages. Bolivia and Venezuela give all Indigenous languages official status. Canada, Argentina, and the U.S. allow provinces and states to decide. Brazil limits recognition to localities. Canada Bill C-91, passed in 2019, supports Indigenous languages through sustainable funding and

784-435: Was not retained. The peoples he called "Algic" were later included among the speakers of Algonquian languages. This language group is also referred to as "Algonquian-Ritwan" and "Wiyot-Yurok-Algonquian." When Edward Sapir proposed that the well-established Algonquian family was genetically related to the Wiyot and Yurok languages of northern California , he applied the term Algic to this larger family. The Algic urheimat

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