The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
50. How Many Native American Languages are there?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
Marianne Mithun [+]
University of California, Santa Barbara
Marianne Mithun is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work covers such areas as morphology (word structure), relations between grammar and discourse, language typology, language contact, and language change, particularly the mechanisms by which grammatical structures evolve. She has worked with speakers of a number of North American languages, including Mohawk, Cayuga, Tuscarora, Seneca, Lakota, Central Alaskan Yup’ik, and Navajo, as well as several Austronesian languages. She has also worked with a number of communities on projects aimed at documenting their traditional languages and training speakers to teach them to younger generations.
Description
Many people believe there is just one language native to the U.S.: ‘Indian’. However, there is evidence of nearly three hundred languages spoken north of Mexico before the arrival of Europeans. Each shows us unique ways of looking at the world, ways that have been shaped by millennia of daily interactions among their speakers.