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Information about the Indigenous Languages of Latin America

For an overview of the languages, language families, and issues facing speakers of indigenous languages in Latin America, read About the Indigenous Languages of Latin America.

This page provides links to some lists and tables that we have created to help users find the resources that interest them in the archive. An explanation of the data contained in the language family tables is given below.

The Variant Names table lists, in alphabetical order, all of the languages that are currently represented in the archive. The name in the left column is the name that appears on AILLA's menus, search pages, and in the results of searches. Common variant names for that language are listed in the column on the right.

How we choose a language name

In general, we will use the most common name in its Spanish or Portuguese form, listing the English spelling as a variant name. Following Kaufman (1994a,b) we will not use the most common name if it is actually a pejorative term in some other language, unless there is no alternative available. For example, the Zoque spoken in Veracruz, Mexico, has been commonly known as Sierra Popoluca. But since Popoluca means something like 'gibberish' in Nahua, many speakers and linguists now prefer the name Soteapaneco, so this is what we use at AILLA.

For the Mayan languages of Guatemala, we use the spellings recommended by the Academy of Mayan Languages. As we learn about official names and spellings established by indigenous organizations, we will adopt those for the archive as well.

Language Family Tables

There are two tables presenting information about language names, dialects, and language families:

Meso-American Languages (including northern Mexico)

South American Languages (including the Caribbean islands)

The information in these tables is derived from the six sources listed at the bottom of this page. The backbone of the tables is the information in Kaufman 1994a and 1994b. The family trees, however, are greatly simplified, along the lines of Sherzer (??) and Campbell (1997). We leave out intermediate nodes, such as Eastern Otomanguean, since the goal here is to facilitate searching the archive for related resources, not to present a definitive analysis of the language families. We refer interested readers to the cited works for greater depth of information.

The tables are bilingual, since they are too large to maintain separate versions. There are five columns in each table:

Name: This is the name that we will use for this language or family on AILLA's interfaces. Family names are always in boldface. Sometimes a boldface name in this column is a name that is also commonly used for a single language, like Mixteco. These names are treated as family names whenever Kaufman lists one or more sub-languages under that heading. What that means is that there is more than one language, linguistically speaking, in this group, each of which may have several distinct dialects. The language vs. dialect situation for some "languages", like Mixteco and Zapoteco, is as complicated as the situation for the Romance languages in Europe: there are many mutually intelligible dialects, some dialects that are not mutually intelligible, not enough information and not enough different names to go around. Kaufman often provides sub-groupings, like Northern, Central, and Southern; we list these in the Names column, because that is their linguistic level in the family tree. It is up to the speakers and to history to decide how to sort these complex groups into languages and give them names.

Variant names: This column contains quite a lot of information for some languages:

1. First is a list of variant names, beginning with the autonym - a name used by speakers, which often means something like 'human language' - presented in brackets. We haven't used all of these on our interfaces yet, because they may not be well known outside the speech community, or widely used within it. Different spellings or translations of the same name are separated by ~. (Note: some of the autonyms use characters that may not be included in a font that you have on your computer. We are working on solutions to this problem.)
2. Second, names of dialects are listed, in parentheses. Variant spellings or translations of the same dialect name are separated by ~. A dialect that has its own Language Code goes on a separate line. Kaufman lists dialects for some languages; these are always listed first, and matched to Ethnologue codes whenever possible. Then all the varieties that have unique codes are listed, one per line. These may or may not actually be separate dialects (see below).

Parent: The parent of the language in the first column is given here. The root of a family tree can be identified by the fact that its Parent is 0, and the whole line is in boldface.

Language Code: This is a three-letter code that uniquely identifies a language or dialect. We use these codes to create filenames for AILLA's resources, to look up resources in the database by language, and to respond to requests for information about a particular language from other search engines.

The codes were designed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics and are published in the Ethnologue (2001). They have been adopted by the international community of language archives because they include all of the world's 6,000 languages, instead of just the 100 or so most widely-spoken ones. Archives need to use codes to identify languages, because many languages have several different names. For example, the language we call 'German' in English is called 'Alemán' in Spanish, 'Deutsch' in German, and 'Tysk' in Norwegian. It is very inefficient for a computer to search for all these different names, so we use a single code (GER) to identify the language, and map all the variant names on to that code.

There is a code in the Ethnologue for nearly every language listed in Kaufman 1994a&b. Unfortunately, there are too many codes for some languages, or more precisely, some languages have been divided into too many subvarieties. For example, a language with many speakers, like Zapotec, may have codes for every town in which the language is spoken! There are 58 different codes for Zapotecan language varieties, but there are certainly not 58 different Zapotecan languages, and probably not 58 distinctively different dialects of Zapotec.

Where we have the expertise to trim these lists, we have done so. For example, we list only one variety of the Mayan language Mam, instead of the four listed in the Ethnologue. We are hoping that our community of speakers and experts will help us to refine these lists as time goes by. We will pass the information on to the team at EMELD* that is responsible for reviewing and revising the Ethnologue language codes, with input from the linguistic community through the LINGUIST list.

Country code: The countries of the world are also identified by three-letter codes, which come from the International Standards Organization, ISO-3166. In the tables, the country code is given at as high a level in the language family tree as possible. For example, all the Mixe-Zoquean languages are spoken in Mexico, so the country code appears in the row that is the root of that family tree. But some Mayan languages are spoken in Mexico, and some in Guatemala, so there is a country code given for each individual Mayan language.

References:

Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ethnologue, Languages of the World, 14th Edition. (2001). SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com/.

ISO 3166 Country Codes. (1997). [online]. ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency: http://www.nw.com/zone/iso-country-codes.

Kaufman, Terrence. (1994a). "The native languages of Meso-America." In Christopher Moseley and R.E. Asher, (eds.), Atlas of the World's Languages. London: Routledge. 34-41.

Kaufman, Terrence. (1994b). "The native languages of South America." In Christopher Moseley and R.E. Asher, (eds.), Atlas of the World's Languages. London: Routledge. 46-76.

Sherzer, Joel. (1991). "A richness of voices: Appendix". In Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., (ed.), America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples before the Arrival of Columbus. New York: Knopf. pp.445-449.

* EMELD: Electronic Metadata for Endangered Language Data. A 5-year project to build infrastructure for creating and supporting interoperable archives of endangered language resources, among other things. http://saussure.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/emeld/