Indigenous Languages of South America
Introduction
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The South American Indians migrated from the north, but none of their languages are related to the language families of North and Central America. South America is one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world with 37 language families and over 70 unclassified languages. Indigenous languages are used throughout the entire continent. They are spoken by over 11 million people alongside Spanish and Portuguese. Below is an interesting comparison of the language situation in the three Americas based on data from Ethnologue.
Some linguists believe that the indigenous languages of South America may all have evolved from a common ancestor. They also believe that the greater variety of indigenous languages in South America may have resulted from the fact that these languages had no contact with each other for a very long period of time. In the absence of historical records and writing, it is difficult to reconstruct the intermediate stages that might have shed light on the common ancestry of these languages. In addition, incomplete knowledge about many indigenous languages makes it difficult to determine the difference between a dialect and a language on the one hand, and a family (composed of languages) and stock (composed of families or of very different languages) on the other. At the moment these can be determined only approximately. Despite considerable work done by linguists, ethnographers and missionaries, especially in the 20th century, few indigenous languages the South American continent have been adequately analyzed and described. Many tribes consist of small numbers living in extremely remote jungle areas. Even in the more accessible cases, there is considerable uncertainty over the identity of the languages and boundaries between them. There is great confusion in the names of languages and language families, due to the different orthographic traditions of Spanish and Portuguese, and tothe lack of a standardized classification scheme. A variety may be considered a dialect by one author, and a separate language by another. The same goes for language families. South America has more language families and more languages but has fewer languages per family than North and Central America. Only a few South American language families have more than 10 languages. They are listed below.
Most of the indigenous languages of South American have small populations of speakers. The most populous languages are listed below:
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Quechua in Bolivia and Guarani in Paraguay have official status along with Spanish. The rest of the languages have no recognized status and are severely endangered or on the brink of extinction because people who speak them are under tremendous social, economic, and political pressures to switch to Spanish or Portuguese (in Brazil). Even languages with relatively large populations of speakers are in danger of disappearing by the end of the 21st century unless governments institute meaningful language preservation programs. Majority of indigenous people in Latin America are bilingual, speaking both their native language and the national language. Many are multilingual speaking several indigenous languages in addition to Spanish or Portuguese.
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Several reasons are given for the linguistic diversity of South America. One reason is that there were few pre-Columbian empires in the New World to spread their languages across large territories with the notable exception of the 
Structure
Sound System
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The sound systems of South American languages are extremely diverse and share few phonological features, except for the absence of complext consonant clusters that characterizes all languages. The number of phonemes ranges from 42 in Jaqaru to 17 in Asháninka. Quechua has only three vowels, while Apinayé has ten oral and 7 nasal vowels. Some languages have tonal stress ranging from two to five different tones. The sound systems of South American languages are extremely diverse and share few phonological features, except for the absence of complext consonant clusters that characterizes all languages. The number of phonemes ranges from 42 in Jaqaru to 17 in Asháninka. Quechua has only three vowels, while Apinayé has ten oral and 7 nasal vowels. Some languages have tonal stress ranging from two to five different tones. |
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Grammatical systems of the indigenous languages of South America are extremely diverse. Most of them are agglutinative, i.e., they add prefixes and/or suffixes to roots to form words and to express grammatical functions. Nouns Pronouns Word order |
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A great deal of borrowing has taken place in areas where the indigenous people of South America had close contact with Spanish or Portuguese.
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Writing |
South American indigenous languages are written with the Latin script. Their orthographies generally reflect the orthographic traditions of Spanish and Portuguese and do not usually accurately reflect the distinctive sound features of the languages. Spanish and Portuguese missionaries developed dictionaries and grammars for many languages. They left behind mostly religious texts that did not reflect the native cultures. Most of the folklore has been collected only in the 20th century. Literacy rates in the indigenous languages are extremely low, so efforts are being made to promote literacy in the native Indian languages. Orthographies have existed since the 17th century, for some language such as Guarani and Quechua but for most other languages, orthographies have been devised quite recently. And there are still a number of languages that lack writing systems. |
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Did you know where these words came from different indigenous languages of South America via Spanish or Portuguese?
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Resources |
Click here to find out where South American Indian languages are taught in the United States Online resources for the study of South American Indian languages Click on the name of the language to learn more about it on this website |
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