Indigenous languages of South America

The indigenous languages of South America are those whose origin dates back to the pre-Columbian era.

[2] The first grammar of a South American language was that of classical Quechua published by Domingo de Santo Tomás in 1560.

The missionaries of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries carried out an intense activity of data collection, grammar writing (usually called language arts), dictionaries, and catechisms, in order to evangelize the indigenous populations.

The descriptive work has had problems due to the shortage of linguists and the rapid extinction of many languages, often situated in remote and difficult to reach areas that require urgent study before they disappear completely.

These languages produce scientific interest since their vocabulary reflects the traditional culture and contains important data about the fauna, flora, and local history of little-known regions.

[3]: 821 Urheimat of other language families:[3]: 821 Although some of the classifications are based on geographic, ethnographic, or cultural criteria, these methods are not valid from a linguistic point of view, even though on some occasions there are correlations between them and a genuine phylogenetic relationship.

And equally, the villages of a homogeneous cultural area like the eastern slopes of the Andes in fact, belong to unrelated linguistic families.

The major part of the proper linguistic classification of the languages of South America has been done on the basis of vocabulary lists and some grammatical traits.

That procedure, although it leads to the clear recognition of the top-level genetic groups, does not distinguish well between the coincidences and the lexical loans of the words retained from the common proto-language.

Just recently the comparative method has been applied carefully and patiently to find relationships between the identifiable phylogenetic subgroups from a simple list of vocabulary.

For that reason, the phylogenetic classifications of the languages of America are far from definitive, and the best of them, in the best of cases, are only an approximation of the real relationships.

For that reason, many proposed families like Macro-Arawakan or Macro-Chibchan are questionable because evidence that exists in their favor is sporadic, debatable, and not very solid.

The lack of orthographic standardization and the multiplicity of names for the same language sometimes make it difficult to compare among classifications of different authors.

The first well-founded classification that used proper linguistic data is that of the American anthropologist D. G. Brinton (1891), which recognized 73 families on the basis of grammatical similarities and a brief list of vocabulary.

These propose a reduction in the number of subgroups and, at least the first two authors, accept the Amerind hypothesis; that ultimately all of the families of America (except Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene) are related.

Below is a list of South American language families and isolates grouped by geographic region.

The more frequent common characteristics are similar to those found in the rest of the world, so there are no peculiarities of the languages of South America.

Isolating languages, which practically lack affixes, such as Shelknam and Tehuelche, are quite rare in South America.

The composition is very frequent, just like in the rest of the world, although it is a rare procedure in Chonan languages that are highly isolating.

It is also common in some languages (Guaicuru, Mataco, Cocama) for some words to have different forms if the speaker is male or female.

It is also common to mark, in the third person, if the referent is present or absent, sitting or standing, and other distinct incidental similarities (Movima, Guaicuru).

Other languages, like Jébero, basically express the grammatical mood, making the other verbal categories less important.

It is also very common to use directionals or affixes that indicate movement with respect to the speaker, or the listener, or the location in the verbal action (Quechua, Záparo, Itonama).

For the grammatical modifier, the use of equations is frequent, formed by the simple juxtaposition of subject, features that are common in many languages.