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In the United States, the Navajo language is the most spoken Native American language, with more than 200,000 speakers in the Southwestern United States. The US Marine Corps recruited Navajo men, who were established as code talkers during World War II.
This chart lists the thirty Native American Indian languages with the most native speakers. We have included all Amerindian languages, from North America, Central America, and South America.
The Navajo language, for instance, is the most spoken Native American language today, with nearly 170,000 speakers. The next most common is Yupik, at 19,750, which is spoken in Alaska. However, the majority of Native Americans today speak only English.
Some of these languages— e.g., Aztecan of central Mexico and the Maya languages of Yucatan and Guatemala—belonged to large and complexly organized empires and probably accounted for most of the native population. Others were far more restricted in area and numbers of speakers.
North American Indian languages, those languages that are indigenous to the United States and Canada and that are spoken north of the Mexican border. A number of language groups within this area, however, extend into Mexico, some as far south as Central America.
The Native languages of the Americas with the largest number of speakers encompass a diverse array of linguistic families and cultural backgrounds. Notably, Quechua stands out as one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in Americas.
Native American tribes have lived and thrived upon the North American landscape for thousands of years—since long before there was a United States. Historically, about 500 distinct Native languages were spoken in North America. All Code Talkers were fluent speakers of their tribes’ languages.