those languages that are indigenous to the United States and subarctic Canada and that are spoken north of the Mexican border. A number of language groups within this area, however, extend as far south as Central America. The present article focuses on the native languages of Canada and the United States. (For further information on the native languages of Mexico and Central America, see Mesoamerican Indian languages; for most of the languages of Arctic America, see Eskimo-Aleut languages. (Eskimo-Aleut languages))

The Indian languages of North America are both numerous and diverse. Their original number has been estimated at 300; these tongues were spoken by a native population of approximately 1.5 million. The number of languages still used was estimated at about 200 by the American linguist Wallace Chafe in 1962. Some of these had only one or two elderly speakers. The numbers continue to drop, but with some notable exceptions; e.g., Navajo (Navajo language) is steadily increasing in number of speakers. As a consequence of the growing trend toward extinction in the American Indian languages, the field of study is becoming more concerned with the past than with the future. Even so, the rich diversity of these languages provides a valuable laboratory for linguistic theory; certainly the discipline of linguistics could not have developed as it has, especially in the United States, without the Native American languages. In this article, the present tense will be used in referring to both extinct and surviving languages.

Within the diversity of the North American Indian languages, no general characterization is possible; various features of structure are common to them, but there is no feature or complex of features shared by all. At the same time, there is nothing primitive about these languages. They draw upon the same linguistic resources and display the same regularities and complexities as do the languages of Europe. If historical connections are sought among the Indian tongues, some languages clearly show numerous and systematic resemblances comparable to those between Spanish, French, and Italian. These similarities strongly suggest classification as a linguistic family. North American Indian languages can then be grouped into some 57 families. On this level, too, the diversity of some areas is notable. Thirty-seven families lie west of the Rocky Mountains and 20 in California (California Indian) alone; California thus shows more linguistic variety than all of Europe. Some families seem to be related to each other in more remote historical groupings, often called phyla. Such classifications border on speculation, however, partly because data are lacking on many languages (because they are extinct or still unstudied) and partly because of the difficulty in distinguishing, at the deeper historical levels, between resemblances caused by common origin and those resulting from linguistic borrowing.

In any case, no theory of common origin for the North American Indian languages has become established. Although most anthropologists believe that North America was populated mainly by people who migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait land bridge, attempts to relate Native American languages to Asian languages have not gained general acceptance. (There is one possible exception—the relationship of Eskimo-Aleut languages to certain Siberian languages.) The linguistic diversity of native North Americans suggests, indeed, that the area was populated as a result of several waves of migration by peoples of distinct linguistic stocks of Asia; these stocks may have no modern survivors.

The first comprehensive classification into families of the North American Indian languages was made in 1891 by the American John Wesley Powell (Powell, John Wesley), who based his study on impressionistic resemblances in vocabulary. A principle of nomenclature adopted by Powell has been widely used ever since: families are named by adding -an to the name of one prominent member; e.g., Caddoan is the family including Caddo and other languages. For this most obvious level of relationship, the Powell classification remains essentially unchallenged. Various scholars, however, have attempted to group the families into larger units that reflect deeper levels of historical relationship. Of these efforts, one of the most ambitious and best-known is that of Edward Sapir (Sapir, Edward), which was first published in the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1929. In Sapir's classification, all the languages are grouped into six phyla—Eskimo-Aleut, Algonquian- (Algonkian-) Wakashan, Na-Dené, Penutian, Hokan-Siouan, and Aztec-Tanoan—established on the basis of very general grammatical resemblances. In 1958, the American linguist Mary R. Haas established precise sound correspondences between the Algonquian languages and a “Gulf” group in the southeastern United States that Sapir had assigned to the Hokan-Siouan phylum. Since that time, various reconsiderations of Sapir's groupings have been proposed. A classificatory map published by Charles F. and Florence M. Voegelin in 1966 offers one such classification, and it is likely to serve as a standard reference point for some time. While it preserves Sapir's Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dené, Penutian, and Aztec-Tanoan groups, it proposes reconstituted Macro-Algonquian, Macro-Siouan, and Hokan phyla and allows nine families to remain unclassified, pending further research.

The Indian languages of North America, like all languages in the world, have always existed in contact with other tongues. From this situation bilingualism, or multilingualism, has resulted; the extent is determined by sociological factors. The Indian languages show varying degrees of linguistic acculturation; (acculturation) i.e., there may be borrowing between languages not only of vocabulary items but also of phonological, grammatical, and semantic features. In aboriginal times, in areas where bilingualism was most important (e.g., the Northwest), there tended to be well-defined linguistic areas in which languages of diverse genetic affiliations came to share numerous structural characteristics through the process of borrowing. As noted above, such phenomena create difficulties for attempts at genetic classifications. In a few cases, situations of language contact have given rise to a pidgin or compromise language that is composed of elements from various sources and is used as a second language, especially in trading. An example is the Chinook Jargon of the Northwest; this came to be used by many whites and absorbed many loanwords from French and English before its eventual obsolescence.

In more recent times, contact of Indian languages with European languages—French, English, Spanish, and Russian—has again resulted in bilingualism. With the Indian languages generally relegated to a socially subordinate position (and with many of them headed for extinction), borrowing, however, has involved the relatively superficial level of vocabulary more often than the deeper levels of language structure, such as the sound system or grammar. The effects on European languages are apparent mainly in place names like Massachusetts and Seattle and in names like squash and abalone for native American plants and animals. Among the Indians, the type and degree of linguistic adaptation to European culture has varied greatly, depending on sociocultural factors. For example, among the Karok of northwestern California, a tribe that suffered harsh treatment at the hands of whites, there are only a few loanwords from English (e.g., ápus “apples”), a few calques or loan translations (the “pear” is called vírusur “bear,” because English “pear” and “bear” are merged in Karok pronunciation), but a large number of new formations from native materials; e.g., a hotel is called am-naam “eating place.”

The term grammatical structure as used here refers to both the traditional categories of morphology—how words are made up—and syntax—how words are combined into sentences. It should again be emphasized that in grammar, as well as in phonological or semantic structure, neither the American Indian languages nor any other languages in the world display anything that could be called primitive in the sense of undeveloped or rudimentary. Every language has a structure as complex, as subtle, and as efficiently adaptable to cultural needs as that of Latin or English, for example.

The North American Indian languages display great diversity, so that it is not possible to characterize them as a group by the presence or absence of any particular grammatical peculiarities. At the same time, there are some characteristics that, though not unknown elsewhere in the world, are sufficiently widespread to be considered typical of the continent or of particular linguistic areas within North America. The phenomenon of polysynthesis, in which many sentence elements are expressed within the boundaries of a single word by compounding and affixation, is especially characteristic of Eskimo and Algonquian, but is also found elsewhere. An illustration from the Algonquian group is the Menominee form nekees-pestɛh-wenah-nɛɛwaaw “but I did see him on the way.” Incorporation, the compounding of a noun with a verb, is rarely used in English (e.g., “to baby-sit”) but is common in some Indian languages; e.g., Mohawk ke-wẽna-weiẽhõ “I-language-understand.” (The symbols used that are not found in the Latin alphabet have been adopted from phonetic alphabets.)

Some especially common characteristics of North American languages are the following:

The following five grammatical features are less typically North American, but are nevertheless distinctive of many areas. First person pronouns in many languages show a distinction between a form inclusive of the addressee—“we” denoting “you and I”—and an exclusive form—“I and someone other than you.” Some languages also have a distinction in number between singular, dual, and plural pronouns. Reduplication, the repetition of all or part of a stem, is widely used to indicate distributed or repeated action of verbs; e.g., in Karok, imyah means “breathe,” imyáhyah means “pant.” In Uto-Aztecan languages, reduplication sometimes is associated with plural nouns, as in Pima gogs “dog,” go-gogs “dogs.” In many languages, verb stems are distinguished on the basis of the shape or other physical characteristics of the associated noun; thus in Navajo, in referring to motion, 'áⁿ is used for round objects, táⁿ for long objects, tíⁿ for living things, lá for ropelike objects, etc. Similar distinctions may refer to dual and plural number. Karok has ikpuh “one swims,” iθpuh “two swim,” ihtak “several swim.”

Verb forms also frequently specify the location or direction of an action by the use of prefixes or suffixes. In Karok, for example, from paθ “throw” is derived páaθ-roov “throw upriver,” páaθ-raa “throw uphill,” paaθ-rípaa “throw across-stream,” and as many as 38 other similar forms. Some languages also specify the instrument of an action, generally by prefixation; e.g., Pomo phi-de- “to move by batting with a stick,” phu-de- “to move by blowing,” pha-de- “to move by pushing with the end of a stick.” Lastly, many languages have evidential forms of verbs that indicate the type of validity of the information reported; such distinctions may assume the importance played by tense and aspect in European languages. Thus Hopi distinguishes wari “he ran, runs, is running” as a reported event, from warikŋwe “he runs (e.g., on the track team),” which is a statement of general truth, and from warikni “he will run,” which is an anticipated event. In other languages verb forms consistently discriminate hearsay from eye-witness reports. Such a system might be very welcome in other societies; e.g., especially as regards the reliability of news reports.

The languages of North America are as diverse in their systems of pronunciation as they are in other ways. In terms of the number of contrasting sounds (phonemes), the Northwest Coast is characterized as a linguistic area by the unusual richness of its systems. A language like Tlingit has approximately 50 consonants and vowels (a comparable count for English would number 35). By contrast, Karok has only 23. The richest sound inventories seem to occur where bilingualism was commonest, and sounds were borrowed between languages.

The large number of consonants that is found in many Indian languages is based on the use of a number of phonetic contrasts that are relatively unfamiliar in European languages. In English, different consonants are produced by vibrating the vocal cords (which results in voiced sounds) or by not vibrating them (which gives unvoiced sounds); by shutting off the air momentarily, thus producing stops, or by letting the airstream pass through the mouth with friction (producing fricatives); and by placing the tongue in a variety of positions. The Indian languages also use these mechanisms, but sometimes others as well. The glottal stop, an interruption of breath produced by closing the vocal cords (as in the middle of English oh-oh!) is a common consonant. A related phenomenon, widespread in western North America, is the use of glottalized consonants, as when a t is produced with near simultaneous closure and reopening of the vocal cords. This is recorded with an apostrophe; it differentiates terms like Hupa (Athabascan) teew “underwater” from t'eew “raw.”

The number of consonantal contrasts is also frequently expanded by distinguishing a larger number of tongue positions than do most European languages. Many languages distinguish two types of velar (velarization) sounds (sounds made with the back of the tongue)—a k much like an English k, and a uvular q, produced further back in the mouth. Some languages even differentiate three such k sounds—front, middle, and back. Labiovelars, velar sounds that have simultaneous lip-rounding, are also common. Thus Tlingit has 21 phonemes made in the velar area alone: g, k, uvular G, q, glottalized k', q', labiovelar g^w, k^w, k'^w, G^w, q^w, q^w', in addition to the corresponding fricatives ɣ and x, with uvular X, glottalized x', X', and labiovelar x^w, X^w, x'^w, X'^w. In comparison, English has only two sounds, k and g, made in the same area of the mouth.

Another class of sounds common in North America, especially in the West, is that of the laterals, which are produced by stopping the breath with the central part of the tongue but allowing it to escape at the sides. Alongside the common lateral l, such as exists in English, many Indian languages have a voiceless counterpart, similar to the Welsh ll; this sound is approximated by the thl in northwestern place names such as Cathlamet. To this some languages also add glottalized varieties, as well as a close-knit tl unit, which may in turn be aspirated or glottalized, so that there may result, as in Navajo, a total of five distinguishable lateral sounds.

In some Indian languages, as in English, stress is significant in distinguishing the meaning of words. In others, musical pitch plays a linguistic function, as it does in Chinese; e.g., in Navajo (Navajo language), bíní' is “his nostril,” bìnì' is “his face,” and bìní' is “his waist.” (High and low pitches are indicated with the acute and grave accents, respectively.)

A peculiarity of some northwest coast languages is their use of complex consonant clusters, as in Bella Coola tlk'^wix^w “don't swallow it.” Some words even lack vowels entirely; e.g., nmnmk' “animal.”

Processes of phonological change, in which differences of sound are associated with grammatical distinctions (as with English f and v in “half,” “halves,” “to halve”), are also found in North American languages. In some languages, for example, consonantal change is related to diminutive meaning: thus Luiseño r changes to đ in ŋarúŋru-š “pot,” ŋadúŋdu-mal “pot-small.” Vowel harmony, a process whereby vowels change to resemble adjacent ones, is further attested in North America. Yurok in northwestern California, for example, has an unusual r vowel, comparable to the sound in English “bird”; when this occurs in a suffix, stem vowels change to agree with it, thus lo'ɣe “black” + -'r'y (animate suffix) yields lr'rɣr'r'y “black animal.”

The word stock of American Indian languages, like those of other languages, is composed both of simple stems and of derived constructions; the derivational processes commonly include affixation (the use of prefixes, suffixes, etc.) in addition to compounding in some languages. A few languages use internal sound change, similar to the case of English “song” from “sing”; e.g., Yurok pontet “ashes,” prncrc “dust,” prncrh “to be gray.” New vocabulary items are also acquired by borrowing, as mentioned above.

It should be noted that, in languages generally, the meaning of a vocabulary item cannot be adequately inferred from a knowledge of its historical origin or from knowing the meaning of its parts. For example, the name of an early 19th-century trapper, McKay, entered Karok as mákkay, but with the extended meaning of “white man.” It was then compounded with a native noun váas “deerskin blanket” to give the neologism makáy-vaas “cloth”; this in turn was compounded with yukúkku “moccasin” to give makayvas-yukúkku “tennis shoes.” At each stage of vocabulary formation, meaning is determined not simply by etymology but also by arbitrary extensions or limitations of semantic value.

It is in the area of semantic structure that American Indian vocabulary is likely to present some surprises to the investigator. It is frequently observed that the immense diversity of the physical universe is reduced by every society to a manageable set of classifications embodied in its vocabulary. But there are few universals in such classification, and every language makes its unique semantic divisions. One language may make many specific discriminations in a particular area, while another is content with a few general terms; the difference is correlated with the importance of the semantic area for the particular society. Thus English is highly specific in classifying bovines (bull, cow, calf, heifer, steer, ox), even to the point of lacking a general cover term in the singular (what is the singular of cattle?), but for other species it has only cover terms like camel, llama. North American Indian vocabularies, as would be expected, embody semantic (semantics) classifications that reflect native American environmental conditions and cultural traditions.

Interest in the semantic classifications of American Indian languages, especially in Hopi, has been particularly stimulated by the work of the American investigator Benjamin Lee Whorf (Whorf, Benjamin Lee). When English discriminates “air-plane,” “aviator,” and “flying insect,” Hopi (Hopi language) generalizes with a single term masa'ytaka, roughly “flier”; but when English uses a single general term, “water,” Hopi differentiates pāhe “water in nature” from kēyi “water in a container.”

The vocabularies of different languages may differ not only in the categorization of particular items but also in the general principles of semantic organization; such differences may be found even between neighbouring languages in a single culture area. English, for example, tends to exhaust the universe of flora and fauna with multilevelled hierarchical classifications such as “plant, bush, berry bush, gooseberry bush” or “animal, insect, louse, body louse,” but the languages of northwestern California, by contrast, have relatively few generic terms and many vocabulary items that do not fall into any such hierarchy. The generic terms of Yurok refer, roughly, to “quadruped mammal,” “fish,” “snake,” “bird,” “tree,” “bush,” “grass,” “flower,” and “berry”; the organization in the neighbouring Tolowa language is simpler, lacking “quadruped mammal” and “fish.” In such frameworks, a term like Yurok wrrɣr “body louse” cannot be subsumed in the larger classes of “louse” or “insect” because none exist. The placing of terms in semantic pigeonholes tends to be replaced, in these semantic systems, by identifying them in terms of similarity. A Yurok speaker, asked to identify a flowering bush for which he knows no name will describe it not as “a kind of bush,” but as sahsip seɣon “similar to wild lilac.” Such evidence suggests that the semantic structures of some American Indian vocabularies are based on classes defined less by their boundaries than by their centres.

Another type of semantic structuring is illustrated by certain systems of kinship (kinship terminology) terms. In Fox, an Algonquian language, the term for maternal uncle also includes maternal grandmother's sister's son's son (a kind of second cousin). This can be accounted for by recognizing some very simple rules, rules that apply to the other terms of the kinship system as well: (1) siblings of the same sex, as linking relatives, are reckoned as equivalent; (2) a father's sister, as a linking relative, is equivalent to a sister, and conversely, a mother's brother's child is equivalent to a mother's brother. Then a mother's mother's sister's son's son, by rule 1, is equivalent to a mother's mother's son's son; but because one's mother's son is one's brother, this is the same as a mother's brother's son; and this in turn, by the converse of rule 2, is equivalent to a mother's brother. It is clear that the semantic systems of American Indian languages exhibit not only structures of hierarchy and similarity but also rules of semantic equivalence.

The exotic character of American Indian semantic structures, as manifested not only in their vocabularies but also in the relationships expressed by their morphological categories and syntactic patterns, has led a number of scholars to speculate on the relationships between language, culture, and habitual thought patterns or “world view.” It was hypothesized that the unique organization of the universe that is embodied in each language might act as a determining factor in the individual's habits of perception and of thought, thus forming and maintaining particular tendencies in the associated nonlinguistic culture. As Edward Sapir put it,

This idea was further developed, largely on the basis of work with American Indian languages, by Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf, and is now often known as the Whorfian hypothesis. Whorf's initial arguments focussed on the strikingly different organization of experience that can be found between English and Indian ways of saying “the same thing.” From such linguistic differences, Whorf infers underlying differences in habits of thought. It then remains to show how these habits are manifested in nonlinguistic cultural behaviour. Thus, Whorf points out that, in Hopi, words referring to units of time (e.g., “day”) differ from other nouns in that they have no plural form; furthermore, they cannot be counted with the cardinal numerals (“one,” “two,” etc.) but only with the ordinals (“first,” “second,” etc.). From this he infers that when the English speaker speaks of “ten days,” as if the days were an aggregate of separate units, the Hopi speaker, on the other hand, thinks in terms of the cyclic recurrence of a single phenomenon. Whorf attempts to support this idea by reference to Hopi ceremonial behaviour, which involves repeated preparation for future events. If, in the Hopi view, each day is really a recurrence, rather than something new, then it is reasonable to believe that the daily repetition of ceremonial acts will have a cumulative effect on the future. As Whorf says, the Hopi belief is diametrically opposed to the English proverb that “Tomorrow is another day.”

More investigation is necessary to either prove or disprove the Whorfian hypothesis. In any case, the diversity of American Indian languages and cultures has continued to provide a rich laboratory for investigation. A particularly interesting problem is found in the area of northwestern California (California Indian), where several small tribes have very similar cultures, but use languages of very diverse types. These are Karok, genetically classified as Hokan; Yurok and Wiyot, which are Algonquian; and Hupa and Tolowa, Athabascan languages. By the Whorfian hypothesis, one might expect that the difference in languages would have produced a greater diversity in the cultures; or failing that, one might expect the languages to have grown more similar to each other. In fact, both linguistic diversity and cultural uniformity seem to have made modest accommodations to each other. As an example of Whorfian linguistic determinism, the systems of biological taxonomy of Yurok and Tolowa, referred to in the previous section, may be noted. The Yurok have a larger number of generic classifications, which means they have more choice in nomenclature, because either a generic or a specific term can be used. This is consistent with the high degree of choice afforded in Yurok grammar, in which word order is nearly free and many morphological categories are optional. The sparser taxonomy of Tolowa offers less choice, corresponding to a much more rigid grammatical structure.

A different kind of relationship between language and culture is of more interest to the student of North American prehistory, namely, the fact that language retains traces of historical changes in culture and so aids in reconstructing the remote past. Here again the pioneering work was done by Sapir (Sapir, Edward), who pointed out, for instance, that the original home from which a group of related languages or dialects (dialect) has dispersed is more likely to be found in the area of great linguistic diversity; e.g., there are much greater differences in the English dialects of the British Isles than of the more recently settled areas such as North America or Australia. To take an American Indian example, the Athabascan languages are now found in the Southwest (Navajo, Apache), on the Pacific Coast (Tolowa, Hupa), and in the Western Subarctic. The greater diversity of the Subarctic languages leads to the hypothesis that the original centre of Athabascan migration was from that area. This northern origin of the Athabascans was further confirmed in a classic study by Sapir in which he reconstructed parts of prehistoric Athabascan vocabulary, showing, for example, how a word for “horn” had come to mean “spoon” as the ancestors of the Navajo migrated from the far north (where they made spoons of deerhorns) into the Southwest (where they made spoons out of gourds). The correlation of such linguistic findings with the data of archaeology holds great promise for the study of American Indian prehistory.

Although a writing system was in use among the Mayas of Mesoamerica at the time of first European contact, none was known in North America. All writing systems that have been used for North American Indian languages have resulted from the stimulus of European writing, or have actually been invented and introduced by whites. Perhaps the most famous system is that invented by Sequoyah, a Cherokee (Cherokee language), for his native language. It is not an alphabet but a syllabary, in which each symbol typically stands for a consonant-vowel sequence. The forms of characters were derived in part from the English writing system, but without regard to their English pronunciation. Well suited to the language, the syllabary fostered widespread literacy among the Cherokee until their society was disrupted by government action; its use, however, has never died out, and attempts are now being made to revive it.

Other writing systems, invented by missionaries, teachers, and linguists, have also included syllabaries; e.g., for Cree, Winnebago, and some northern Athabascan languages. Elsewhere, alphabetic scripts have been used, adapted from the Roman alphabet by the use of additional letters and diacritics. White educational policy, however, has generally not encouraged literacy in Indian languages. A rich oral literature of American Indian myths, tales, and song texts has been in part published by linguists and anthropologists, and there is now increasing encouragement for the training of Indians to transcribe their own traditions—e.g., among the Navajo. It is possible that there may yet be a flowering of American Indian literature, not only in spoken but also in written form.