American Languages

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The European languages English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French are widely spoken in the Americas, and their New World dialects could justifiably be called American, but this page is only concerned with languages indigenous to the Americas - spoken nowhere else. I'll also ignore pidgins and creoles. There are about 1000 such indigenous languages, most of which are endangered, dormant, or already extinct. The most widely spoken include Quechua, Guaraní, Aymará, Nahuatl, several Mayan languages, and the Inuit languages.

In the centuries since the arrival en masse of Europeans, the indigenous languages have suffered from many insults, ranging from direct suppression to the development of previously isolated areas to simple loss of prestige. In the last few decades, the tides of fortune have turned a little in favor of indigenous languages, and even previously antipathetic institutions like the government and the church have begun to recognize the value of preserving and promoting them. In the modern world, that also means being able to read and write them, even though most of them were never written historically.

That's where Musa comes in. Most of them are now written in a Roman alphabet, but as we'll see, that's usually not a good choice. It's an easy choice, since the Americas are awash in Roman alphabets. That means that keyboards and fonts are available everywhere (as long as we don't add any new letters), that names from indigenous languages can be embedded in Roman text, for example lists of people, and that widespread tools for sorting and lookup can be directly applied. But it also dooms indigenous languages to being transcribed, not written.

Of course, we could design good Roman orthographies for indigenous languages - the Roman alphabet has plenty of letters (1350 in Unicode). But only the 26 letters of the ISO Basic Latin alphabet (the English alphabet) and their accented versions é è ê ë etc. are widely supported. We could use digraphs like ch sh th ng, but the result looks Polish: Szczebrzeszyn.

Another problem with the Roman alphabet is that the letters spell different sounds in the European languages of the Americas: English j as in John isn't pronounced the same as French j as in Jean, Spanish j as in Juan, or Portuguese j as in joão; English son doesn't sound like French son, Spanish son, or Portuguese son. The result is that romanizations of indigenous names are only designed for readers of one European language: they're colonial.

And that brings us to the social aspect: why should indigenous languages be written in colonial alphabets in the first place? OK, we know why they were written in colonial alphabets: because most of them were never written until the arrival of Europeans, so naturally they borrowed writing from the newcomers. But that doesn't explain why that's still the case, 400 years later!

But why should indigenous people write in their own alphabet? In fact, why should they speak their own language at all? Don't they want to participate in the dominant cultures of their modern countries? Don't they want to read textbooks, surf the internet, fill out forms, and all the other possibilities that the dominant languages offer? Yes, they do want all those benefits ... but they also want to maintain their distinct identities, their traditions, their cultures. They want to particpate, not assimilate. And the key to that is bilingualism.

(not finished yet)

Two of them have their own pages on this site:

Quechua Inuit