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What was the first langauge spoken in North America?

Question #80498. Asked by MiSSyPriSSY05.

Related Trivia Topics: North America  
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lanfranco
Answer has 6 votes
lanfranco
20 year member
4170 replies avatar

Answer has 6 votes.
That's just about impossible to say, since scholars do not agree on migration models and periods, as the site below indicates. What linguistic evidence there is suggests that there might have been several parent languages, brought over from the Eurasian landmass, possibly across the Bering Land Bridge.


link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_migration_to_the_New_World

May 16 2007, 8:06 AM
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lanfranco
Answer has 7 votes
Currently Best Answer
lanfranco
20 year member
4170 replies avatar

Answer has 7 votes.

Currently voted the best answer.
Here's another site that briefly discusses the language issue:


link http://history-world.org/American%20Societies.htm

May 16 2007, 8:08 AM
BungeeAZ
Answer has 7 votes
BungeeAZ
23 year member
338 replies

Answer has 7 votes.
The first language spoken in North America would have been the indigenous languages belonging to the native people of the land before the European explorers discovered their habitats and settled there.

May 16 2007, 11:43 AM
odinseye
Answer has 4 votes
odinseye

Answer has 4 votes.
Native North Americanise

May 16 2007, 12:30 PM
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Baloo55th
Answer has 4 votes
Baloo55th
22 year member
4545 replies avatar

Answer has 4 votes.
Joseph Greenberg argues that there were three separate population movements from Asia into North America, but this is regarded as rather a low figure by others. Some may have come via the 'land bridge' - itself a controversial entity - and others by small boats. If we don't even know how many different peoples moved over, or what languages they spoke, how can we possibly say which of them arrived first? Even the relationships between the surviving languages are highly controversial in linguistic circles. And apart from this, so many of the languages present in North America have become extinct - not all down to the evil white man - and natural changes will have taken place further confusing the issue. Part of the problem is that until the arrival of the white man there was no system of writing. Users of English, Spanish and French did record some things - in roman lettering - and a Cherokee syllabary (sort of alphabet) was devised in the early 1800s. Apart from that, there are the Central American pictographic systems which give little help to the paleolinguist.

May 16 2007, 1:07 PM
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