How many languages did the native americans speak?

Answer 1

It is impossible to give an accurate answer since many languages became extinct long before European explorers arrived to record them and others are still being discovered in South America today. The languages spoken by the Clovis people, the Mound Builders and the original occupants of Cahokia for example are unknown and unrecorded.

Only rough estimates can be made; these give around 300 known languages originally spoken north of Mexico, 27 languages in Mexico and Central America and around 1,500 in South America, totalling 1,827. There were probably many more than this.

Answer 2

No accurate answer is possible for the following reasons:

We know quite a lot about the historic native languages of North America, that is those that were spoken at the time of first contact with European explorers. We know absolutely nothing about the languages spoken in prehistoric times - before there was anyone around to record them and make written notes.

We do not know the languages of the first people to cross the Beringia land bridge (the Palaeo-Indians); we do not know the languages of the Anasazi, the Hohokam, the Adena or Glacial Kame cultures; we do not know what languages were used by the builders of Cahokia and various structures in Ohio. These all became extinct or evolved into other languages by the time of first contact.

Logically, all the language groups of Central and South America must have passed slowly through North America in the thousands of years before Columbus turned up, and our knowledge of those language groups is fairly limited.

Some North American languages such as Crow, Assiniboin and Arikara only developed after 1492 due to their parent tribes (Hidatsa, Nakota and Pawnee) being fragmented.

It is likely that in the time since man first arrived in the New World, many thousands of languages have been spoken in North America and we are only familiar with a small proportion of them.