Even the spread of disease, which is thought to have resulted in 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths, was not always an accident. Their guns and horses gave them a major advantage - as did their immunity. When Europeans first began to colonize the Americas in earnest, they brought diseases like smallpox and measles with them, as well as a settlement strategy that involved fighting and killing off Native Americans for their land. North of Mexico, it’s estimated that roughly half of the Native American languages have become extinct, and of those still in use, more than half are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. By the middle of the 20th century, roughly two-thirds of all indigenous American languages (that’s counting North, Central and South America) had died out or were on the brink of extinction. The effect of European settlement was a deleterious one to Native American language and culture, to put it very mildly. ![]() With all of that said, the movement to reclaim and preserve Native American languages has been underway since the Civil Rights era. ![]() They also estimate that without restoration efforts, there will be at most 20 still spoken in 2050. The Columbia Encyclopedia cites a widely accepted estimate that there were more than 15 million speakers of over 2,000 indigenous languages spoken across the entire Western Hemisphere at the time of Christopher Columbus’ arrival.Īccording to the Indigenous Language Institute, there were once more than 300 indigenous languages spoken in the United States, and approximately 175 remain today. Large amounts of local knowledge about fauna and flora, ecosystem management, local place names, spiritual values, and so on are all submerged, altered or gone because the original languages that expressed these concepts are gone or no longer well understood.” ![]() “The highly elaborate dances that accompanied the oral tradition are frequently also gone. “With the loss of the languages, all kinds of wonderful things that the speakers did with their languages have also vanished, for example, some of the greatest works of oral literature ever produced - the multilingual performances with different characters speaking different languages that was found in the Pacific Northwest,” Anderson said. That’s more than all of Europe has combined, he added. It’s probably impossible to measure the true magnitude of indigenous culture and Native American languages that have been lost on this continent, but many organizations have tried.įor instance, Greg Anderson, director of Living Tongues, told National Geographic in 2009 that only five language families exist in Oregon today - with most of them comprising only a handful of speakers - compared to 14 language families in Oregon 200 years ago.
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