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Over a thousand known languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of the 11th century (with the Nordic settlement of Greenland and failed efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador) and the end of the 15th century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus).
notes by Johann Flierl, Wilhelm Poland and Georg Schwarz, culminating in Walter Roth 's The Structure of the Koko Yimidir Language in 1901. [ 207 ][ 208 ] A list of 61 words recorded in 1770 by James Cook and Joseph Banks was the first written record of an Australian language. [ 209 ] c. 1891. Galela.
The most spoken native languages in the United States in 2021 were: [8] English (only language spoken in the household) – 245 million. Spanish – 41.3 million. Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and all other varieties) – 3.40 million. Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.72 million.
In 1821, Sequoyah completed his Cherokee syllabary, enabling reading and writing in the Cherokee language. One of the first North American Indigenous groups to gain a written language, the Cherokee Nation officially adopted the syllabary in 1825, [2] helping to unify a forcibly divided nation with new ways of communication and a sense of ...
Such publications include a Cherokee dictionary and grammar, as well as several editions of the New Testament and Psalms of the Bible [21] and the Cherokee Phoenix (ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ, Tsalagi Tsulehisanvhi), the first newspaper published by Native Americans in the United States and the first published in a Native American language ...
Morris Swadesh further consolidated Sapir's North American classification and expanded it to group all indigenous languages of the Americas in just 6 families, 5 of which were entirely based in the Americas. [17] Vasco-Dene languages included the Eskimo–Aleut, Na-Dene, Wakashan and Kutenai families along with most of the languages of Eurasia.
The Mesoamerican sprachbund is commonly referred to as the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. The languages of Mesoamerica were also among the first to evolve independent traditions of writing. The oldest texts date to approximately 1000 BCE (namely Olmec and Zapotec), though most texts in the indigenous scripts (such as Maya) date to c. 600–900 CE.
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...