Amerind languages

In addition to its use by social scientists to refer (broadly) to the various indigenous languages of The Americas, the term Amerind languages may controversially refer to one of the three families in Joseph Greenberg's classification of all Native American languages—the other two being Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut. Most modern linguists agree, however, that there is not enough evidence to theorize a single Amerind language family, and instead classify these languages into many smaller families.

Related Topics:
The Americas - Joseph Greenberg - Native American languages - Na-Dene - Eskimo-Aleut - Linguist - Language family

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Mithun (1999: 7) sums up the current general consensus:

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:: "An even more encompassing scheme was proposed by Joseph Greenberg, which classified all of the languages of the Americas into just three genetic groups: Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit plus Haida), and Amerind (all other languages of North, Central, and South America). The method employed, simple inspection of vocabulary lists from large numbers of languages, was essentially that used by the earliest philologists before basic techniques of historical reconstruction and classification were developed in the nineteenth century. Serious flaws have been pointed out in both the method and its application, which leave the proposals unsupported. Detailed discussions of the history of genetic classification can be found in Goddard 1999 and Campbell 1997."

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