Bill Gorman, age 15, of Henderson, Nev., for his question:
ARE THERE MANY AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES?
Although the precise member of American Indian languages is unknown, it is estimated that there are about 200 distinct languages still spoken in North America north of Mexico. Perhaps 300 to 400 more were spoken at the time of first European contact.
In Middle America (Mexico and Central America) about 350 Indian languages are known.
South America has been the least studied, linguistically. About 450 Indian languages are in use today: information survives for 120 extinct languages and another 1,500 to 2,000 languages are mentioned in documents.
For the number of past and present speakers of these languages, only rough estimates can be given. It is believed that when Europeans arrived in the Americas, about 1.5 million people spoke Indian languages in North America. This figure is down to about 200,000 today. There were about 5 million in Middle America (up to about 6 million today) and about 10 to 20 million in South America (about 11 to 12 million today).
In present day North America the indigenous language with the most speakers are Navajo (about 80,000) Ojibwa (about 40,000) and Inupiaq. Inupiaq has more than 60,000 speakers and its Greenlandic variety serves as a national language.
In Middle America, Nahuatl or Aztec is spoken by more than 1 million people, the various Mayan languages by about 2 million and a number of other languages by several hundred thousand each.
In South America, Quechua, with more than 8 million speakers, is the most widely used of all American Indian tongues today.
North American languages alone form roughly 60 different language families, with no demonstrable generic relationships among them. Middle America has 19 different families and South America has perhaps 80.
Indian and European colonial languages have borrowed words from one another, Indian languages principally from Dutch (in the Antilles), English, Spanish, Portugese, Russians (in Alaska) and French (in Canada and Louisiana). In turn, many of the European languages took over Indian place names and terms for plants and animals.
Although it is generally believed that the original population of the Americas came from Asia via the Bering Strait, the great linguistic diversity of American languages suggests that the New World may have been populated by multiple migrations.
Nevertheless, with the possible exception of the Eskimo Aleut family, no American language group has been shown to have any connection to any Asian language.
Given their extreme diversity, it is not surprising that American Indian languages differ greatly from one another in their sound systems and grammar. Despite this variety, however, no linguistic trait exists that is the exclusive property of American Indian languages.