Indigenous languages of the Americas (or Amerindian Languages) are spoken by
indigenous peoples from the southern tip of
South America to
Alaska and
Greenland, 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.
Thousands of languages were spoken in North and South America prior to first contact with Europeans between the beginning of the eleventh century (Norwegian settlement of Greenland and attempted settlement of Labrador and Newfoundland) and the end of the fifteenth century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus). The attitudes of most of the European colonizers and their successor states toward Native American languages ranged from benign neglect to active suppression. John Eliot of Massachusetts, however, translated the Bible into an Algonquian language usually called Wampanoag, Massachusett or Natick (1661–63; the first Bible printed in North America) and Spanish missionaries preached to the natives in local languages. They actually spread Quechua beyond its original geographic area. Several indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas from European languages.
But in most cases, the aboriginal languages of the Americas suffered extinction. Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch were brought to the Americas by European settlers and administrators, and are the official or national languages of the modern nation-states of the Americas.
That said, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, and Greenland have one or more official indigenous languages in addition to the colonial language. Several indigenous languages of the Americas had developed their own writing systems, including the Mayan languages and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and nearby related peoples (e.g., the Pipil in El Salvador). These and many other indigenous languages later adapted the Roman alphabet or Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.
