Pre-contact distribution of the proposed Macro-Siouan language family
The Macro-Siouan languages are a proposed language family that includes the Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan families. Most linguists remain unconvinced that these languages share a genetic relationship, and the existence of a Macro-Siouan language family remains a subject of debate.
In the 19th century, Robert Latham suggested that the Siouan languages are related to the Caddoan and Iroquoian languages. In 1931, Louis Allen presented the first list of systematic correspondences between a set of 25 lexical items in Siouan and Iroquoian. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wallace Chafe further explored the link between Siouan and Caddoan languages. In the 1990s, Marianne Mithun compared the morphology and syntax of all the three families. At present, the Macro-Siouan hypothesis based on relations among Siouan, Caddoan, and Iroquoian is not universally accepted as proven.[1]
↑ Mithun, Marianne. 1999. The languages of native North America. p.305. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
↑ Rankin, Robert L., Carter, Richard T., Jones, A. Wesley, Koontz, John E., Rood, David S. & Hartmann, Iren (eds.). (2015). Comparative Siouan Dictionary. Leipzig, Germany: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct. The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other, instead they are classified into a hundred or so language families, as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified due to the lack of information on them.
Amerind is a hypothetical higher-level language family proposed by Joseph Greenberg in 1960 and elaborated by his student Merritt Ruhlen. Greenberg proposed that all of the indigenous languages of the Americas belong to one of three language families, the previously established Eskimo–Aleut and Na–Dene, and with everything else—otherwise classified by specialists as belonging to dozens of independent families—as Amerind. Due to a large number of methodological flaws in the 1987 book Language in the Americas, the relationships he proposed between these languages have been rejected by the majority of historical linguists as spurious.
The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking.
The Caddoan languages are a family of languages native to the Great Plains spoken by tribal groups of the central United States, from present-day North Dakota south to Oklahoma. All Caddoan languages are critically endangered, as the number of speakers has declined markedly due to colonial legacy, lack of support, and other factors.
Mandan is an extinct Siouan language of North Dakota in the United States.
Muskogean is a Native American language family spoken in different areas of the Southeastern United States. Though the debate concerning their interrelationships is ongoing, the Muskogean languages are generally divided into two branches, Eastern Muskogean and Western Muskogean. Typologically, Muskogean languages are agglutinative. One documented language, Apalachee, is extinct and the remaining languages are critically endangered.
The Coosan language family consists of two languages spoken along the southern Oregon coast. Both languages are now extinct.
Adai is an extinct Native American language that was spoken in northwestern Louisiana.
Plateau Penutian is a family of languages spoken in northern California, reaching through central-western Oregon to northern Washington and central-northern Idaho.
The Pomoan, or Pomo, languages are a small family of seven languages indigenous to northern California spoken by the Pomo people, whose ancestors lived in the valley of the Russian River and the Clear Lake basin. Four languages are extinct, and all surviving languages except Kashaya have fewer than ten speakers.
Kalapuyan is a small extinct language family that was spoken in the Willamette Valley of Western Oregon, United States. It consists of three languages.
Siouan or Siouan–Catawban is a language family of North America that is located primarily in the Great Plains, Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southeastern North America with a few other languages in the east.
The Yuki–Wappo or Yukian languages are a small language family of western California consisting of two distantly related languages, both now extinct.
Algonquian–Wakashan is a hypothetical language family composed of several established language families that was proposed in 1929. The proposal consists of the following:
Laurentian, or St. Lawrence Iroquoian, was an Iroquoian language spoken until the late 16th century along the shores of the Saint Lawrence River in present-day Quebec and Ontario, Canada. It is believed to have disappeared with the extinction of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, likely as a result of warfare by the more powerful Mohawk from the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy to the south, in present-day New York state of the United States.
The Gulf languages are a proposed family of native North American languages composed of the Muskogean languages, along with four language isolates: Natchez, Tunica, Atakapa, and (possibly) Chitimacha.
Aztec–Tanoan is a hypothetical and undemonstrated language family that proposes a genealogical relation between the Tanoan and the Uto-Aztecan families. In some forms, Aztec–Tanoan has also included the Zuni isolate. This proposed classification has not been definitively demonstrated, largely because of slow progress in the reconstruction of the intermediate stages of the two language families involved, but is still considered promising by many linguists. The grouping was originally proposed by Edward Sapir in his 1921 classification, but it was not until 1937 that supporting evidence was published by Benjamin Lee Whorf and G. L. Trager. Their proposal included some 67 proposed cognates, but subsequent reviews have found most of them to be unconvincing. A small number of their proposed cognates do seem to have some merit and in his 1997 review of the hypothesis Lyle Campbell states that the proposal is not implausible but requires detailed study. A recent article by Jane H. Hill argues that the evidence cited for the genetic relation by Whorf and Trager is better understood as a result of language contact between the Uto-Aztecan and Tanoan proto-languages.
Wallace Chafe was an American linguist. He was Professor Emeritus and research professor at The University of California, Santa Barbara.
Tutelo, also known as Tutelo–Saponi, is a member of the Virginian branch of Siouan languages that were originally spoken in what is now Virginia and West Virginia in the United States.
The Takelma–Kalapuyan languages are a proposed small language family that comprises the Kalapuyan languages and Takelma, which were formerly spoken in the Willamette Valley and the Rogue Valley in Oregon.
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