Episode 27 The Original American Languages Part 1

Dr John McWhorter (2019)

Film Review

Owing to their intriguing diversity, McWhorter devotes four lectures to indigenous American languages

When Europeans first arrived in American, 300 distinct languages were spoken. Of these 200 are no longer spoken and 50 are hanging by a thread. McWhorter predicts that by 2050 only 12 will be spoken.

At present 350,000 Americans speak indigenous languages, half of them Navajo, Other major indigenous language include Cree, Ojibwe, Hopi, Lakota, Choctaw and Apache.

Many indigenous languages clearly originated in northeast Russia. According to McWhorter, there was a sizeable land bridge known as Beringia between Siberia and Alaska before the last Ice age ended 10,000 years ago and and ocean levels rose.

It’s believed 1,000 Asians migrated to Beringia around 23,000 year ago and were blocked (by glaciers) from traveling further until 16,000 years ago. They likely all spoke the same language on arrival in Beringia. However after 7,000 8,000 years, their population, which had increased exponentially, likely spoke multiple languages.

North American Clovis arrowheads similar to those found in Siberia date from 13,000 years ago and some from El Mate in Southern Chile are 15,000 years old. The Siberian language Ket (see Basque, Ainu, Somali, Etruscan: Languages Without Families) and Navajo are very similar. Both are extremely complicated (all the verbs are irregular) and difficult to learn after infancy.

The massive diversity in Native American language resembles that of Papua New Guinea (see Why Papua New Guinea Has 750 Different Languages ) and the non-Pama-Nyungen languages of Australia (see The Unique Grammar of Indigenous Australian Languages).

At least two distinct families of Native American families have been identified: Na-Dene (Eskimo-Aleut) and Navajo-Apache. The remaining Native American languages probably represent around 20 language families along with numerous language isolates.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/6120000/6120054