Overview

To survey the language prehistory of the entire Americas is a daunting task. For in several fundamental respects, as we shall explore in this opening section, the linguistic panorama here is strikingly distinct from that of the Old World. Moreover, within the scope of this chapter fall not one but two of humanity’s major hearths of “civilisation”, Mesoamerica and the Central Andes; and just as they were essentially independent of each other, so too were the prehistories of their languages. The conquistadors met only the final incarnations of these indigenous cultural trajectories, of course, and soon shattered both. What does live on, however, is the native speech of both Moctezuma and Atahualpa – now as modern Nahuatl and Quechua respectively, to this day among the most widely spoken native languages of the Americas. Moreover, just as the Aztecs and Incas were but the tip of the iceberg, of long and fluctuating trajectories that archaeologists trace back millennia into the past, their languages likewise are just two players among a host of native tongues, rich testimony to the prehistories of the populations that spoke them. Moreover, this complementary level of data on our past – language – can be read just as fully across much of the Americas, irrespective of the presence or absence of complex societies and rich, monumental material culture records.