Before Columbus
The languages of the Americas
When Europeans arrived, the Americas held more than a thousand languages in well over a hundred unrelated families. Many are still spoken; many have fallen silent.
Chapter 1
More than a hundred families
Glottolog records 1,336 languages across North and South America. In variety of families the Americas are among the richest places on Earth: from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, well over a hundred families and isolates with no demonstrable relationship to one another.
Chapter 2
The language of the Inca
Quechua — Runa Simi, “the people’s language” — was the lingua franca of the Inca Empire, which kept its records on knotted cords called khipu. Today the Quechuan languages have millions of speakers along the Andes from Colombia to Argentina, the most widely spoken indigenous languages of the Americas.
Chapter 3
Written in stone
Maya script is the only pre-Columbian writing system of the Americas to have been largely deciphered — a breakthrough of the late twentieth century, after the Soviet scholar Yuri Knorozov showed that it recorded syllables as well as words. Several million people still speak some thirty Mayan languages, among them K’iche’ and Yucatec.
Chapter 4
Tomatoes and chillies
The Aztec Empire spoke Nahuatl. The Spanish carried away not only its crops but their names: tomato (from tomatl), avocado (āhuacatl), chilli (chīlli), coyote (coyōtl). Over a million people still speak varieties of Nahuatl today.
| English | Classical Nahuatl |
|---|---|
| tomato | tomatl |
| avocado | āhuacatl |
| chilli | chīlli |
| coyote | coyōtl |
Chapter 5
Voices of the north
In North America, Navajo became an unbreakable code in the Second World War; the Cherokee Sequoyah invented a script single-handed; Inuktitut in Canada is written in a syllabary first devised by missionaries. But many of the continent’s languages — California alone had around a hundred — are gone, or spoken only by a few elders.