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27-420: The similarities noted between many of the languages of Mesoamerica have led linguistic scholars to propose the constitution of a sprachbund, from as early as 1959. The proposal was not consolidated until 1986, however, when Lyle Campbell , Terrence Kaufman and Thomas Smith-Stark employed a rigid linguistic analysis to demonstrate that the similarities between a number of languages were indeed considerable, with

54-530: A B.A. in archaeology and anthropology from Brigham Young University in 1966, then an M.A. in linguistics from the University of Washington in 1967, followed by doctoral studies at UCLA , earning a Ph.D. in 1971. Campbell has held appointments at the University of Missouri (1971–1974), the State University of New York at Albany (1974–1989), Louisiana State University (1989–1994),

81-755: 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

108-480: A noun and possessive affixes. Pied-piping with inversion is a special word order found in wh-questions. It appears to be found in all Mesoamerican languages, but is rare outside Mesoamerica. All the languages of Mesoamerica have vigesimal , or base twenty numeral systems. This system has also spread to some languages just outside the Mesoamerican cultural area. No language with verb-final basic word order

135-472: A well-founded area: arguably "among the very strongest that are known" (Campbell, Kaufman & Smith-Stark. 1986 p. 556). They also argued that some of the discarded traits might also be taken into consideration as strengthening the proposal, but they were not sufficient by themselves to act as foundation and other well-documented traits of a more ethnolinguistic character might not be considerable as traits that are linguistic but cultural. The following

162-435: Is a brief description of the linguistic traits considered by Campbell, Kaufman and Smith-Stark as defining the Mesoamerican language area. Many of the Mesoamerican languages show a particular kind of construction for possession of nominals. The commonly found construction is "his noun1 noun2" meaning "noun2's noun1" ("his" often is a prefix in this construction), cf. his genitive in some Germanic languages. For example, in

189-501: Is attested in Mesoamerica even though most of the languages bordering on Mesoamerica are verb final ( SOV ). Also no languages with switch reference are attested in Mesoamerica, but this is supposed by Campbell, Kaufman and Smith-Stark to be a secondary effect of the Mesoamerican languages not being verb final. A strong evidence of diffusion throughout Mesoamerica is provided by a number of semantic calques widely found throughout

216-604: 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

243-647: Is the author of 25 books and 200+ articles; two of his books ( American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America and Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspectives , co-written with Alice C. Harris ) were awarded the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award by the Linguistic Society of America for the best book in linguistics published in the previous two years. He is also co-founder of

270-799: The Catalogue of Endangered Languages , and member of the Governance Council for the Endangered Languages Project . Indigenous languages of the Americas 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

297-515: The Kʼicheʼ language , a Mayan language , u-tzi' le achih "the man's dog" literally means "his-dog the man". The similar construction in Nahuatl would be i:-itskʷin in tɬaːkatɬ . Another trait shared by nearly all Mesoamerican languages is relational nouns . Relational nouns are used to express spatial and other relations, much like prepositions in most Indo-European languages but composed of

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324-518: 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

351-787: 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

378-1176: The University of Canterbury , in Christchurch , New Zealand (1994–2004), the University of Utah (2004–2010), and finally the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (2010–). He has been a visiting professor at Australian National University , Colegio de México , Memorial University , Ohio State University , University of Hamburg , University of Helsinki , National Autonomous University of Mexico , Universidad del País Vasco , University of Turku , and at three universities in Brazil . He has held joint appointments in Linguistics, Anthropology, Behavioral Research, Latin American Studies, and Spanish . Campbell's research and teaching specializations include: historical linguistics, American Indian languages, documentation and revitalization of endangered languages, typology, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology , and Uralic languages. Campbell

405-561: 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

432-461: 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

459-538: The Americas are not all related to each other; instead, they are classified into 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

486-489: 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

513-1166: 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

540-669: 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

567-405: The area. For example, in many Mesoamerican languages the words for specific objects are constructed by compounding two different stems, and in many cases these two stems are semantically identical although linguistically unrelated. Among these calques are: Other traits found in Mesoamerican languages, but not found by Campbell, Kaufman and Smith-Stark to be prominent enough to be conclusive for

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594-489: 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

621-468: The conclusion that their origins were very likely caused by diffusion rather than inheritance, the standard criteria for defining a sprachbund. In their 1986 paper "Meso-America as a Linguistic Area" the above authors explored several proposed areal features of which they discarded most as being weakly attested, possibly by chance or inheritance or not confined to the Mesoamerican region. However, five traits in particular were shown to be widely attested among

648-615: 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

675-497: The languages, with boundaries coinciding with that of the Mesoamerican region and having a probable origin through diffusion. They then compared the five traits with the traits defining other language areas considered to be well-established, like the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area and Balkan language area . They concluded that by comparison the proposed Mesoamerican language area could indeed be considered

702-438: The proposal of the language area are: Lyle Campbell Lyle Richard Campbell (born October 22, 1942) is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages , especially those of Central America , and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa . Lyle Campbell was raised in rural Oregon . He received

729-663: 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

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