Native American languages

A. Before Europeans came to the New World, about 400 separate languages were spoken in North America and about 670 in Central and South America. Most of these languages are now gradually dying out.

B. The distribution of these languages poses a problem. The New World was settled from Asia, across the Bering Strait. We would expect that the highest diversity, then, would be in Alaska and Canada. Instead, the north is covered by just two families, while dozens of others are found further south. Diversity is generally highest in South America, California, and other places.

C. This suggests that something interrupted the linguistic “timeline” in the north; genetic and geographical evidence suggests that the last Ice Age largely drove away people in the north, so that the area was repopulated after the thaw. This means that the languages there have had less rather than more time to diverge from one another. The language distribution alone suggests this, even without the other evidence.