ALL Indigenous North American Language Families EXPLAINED (Native Americans / First Nations)

Im from Arizona and I can confirm that Havasupai (sadly, not also true for Hualapai) is spoken by 100% of the Havasupai Tribe. This is probably because of their geographic isolation - they live at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and their village is accessible to the rest of the world only by hours long mule rides, or by helicopter. Havasupai continues to be the primary language in their community for daily communication. It's also worth mentioning that while Havasupai and Hualapai are mutually intelligible, they have different official orthographies and are officially considered separate languages by the Havasupai and Hualapai tribes. The separate orthographies are actually intentional - Leanne Hinton mentions in her book that when she was working with the Havasupai Tribe to develop a standard orthography for their language, she initially collaborated with a colleague that was doing similar work with the Hualapai Tribe, intending to use the same alphabet so language materials could be used by both tribes. However, the tribes, upon learning of this, requested that she and her colleague use different letters for 3-4 phonemes to give Havasupai and Hualapai a distinctive look from each other.

Thank you, sincerely, from someone whose ancestral language, Penobscot-Abnaki, is nearly extinct! It is an Eastern Algonquian language of the Algic branch! Its very, very closely related to Mi'kmaq.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are that many monolingual Navaho speakers. There are lots of poor, fairly isolated communities out there.

Hehé! I'm a Maidu Indian and it was cool to hear you talk about my language and my tribes baskets. My great-great-grandmother was one of the last traditionally trained basketmakers in my tribe and we still have a few of her works. Thank you for talking about my tribe! Nik yaháti'ankano!

Hello, Indigenous speaker here (Loup A, Algonquin). I really found this video very interesting & helpful. I always know which other nations spoke Algonquin, but other than Iroquoian or Siouan, I don't know much 'bout other lingual groups. This video will be a good resource for other ppl trying to understand Amerindian language. Keep up with the good work👍

THANK YOU!!! From a Canadian prairie dwelling Métis Michif Cree learner!!!! :)

I absolutely adore the Salishan family! Its very unique and is head-initial instead of the typical head-final, and has glottalization which I love

One of my favorite things about this channel is you're not afraid to make mistakes. You do incredible research, and you put in an amazing amount of time and effort, but then you freely admit that you're not an expert. Maybe you'll pronounce a word or two wrong, maybe you'll forget a fact, maybe something else, but you don't let that get in the way of you sharing your wonderful research with us. You approach these amazing topics humbly, and I think you're a wonderful example of what a teacher should be: Learn it as well as you can, then teach it as well as you can, and in the process hopefully everyone will learn together. Thanks.

you have no idea how excited i was to see this video in my subscriptions

I agree. I took also always wanted a video like this to exist. Thank you for making it! These wider lens looks at linguistic landscapes are why I developed my linguistic syntopian project, Atlas Altera.

Im never this early but can i make a request? I really want you to touch on the southern most native american tribes, the fueguinos, Yaghan, Kawesqar, Selk’nam, Haush, And the Aonikenk, there are many more but those are the main ones. The languages? seem to be the type that you would make a video on, goodluck!

Great video! However, I would like to point out that the original syllabary Siquoya made for our language used characters that don’t really resemble any other writing system and the randomly chosen characters from other writing systems were only used when it was realized the original characters couldn’t be used on a printing press.

Amazing video, and I'm absolutely obsessed with the Salishan languages now! If it's something you'd be interested in doing, I'd very much love to see similar breakdowns for South/Central American languages, or Australian languages. (Also, new to your channel, and instantly subscribed!)

Now that you’ve mentioned the indigenous languages of the Americas, it might be a good idea to talk about the Maya writing system. It’s one of the 3-5 times fully functional writing was independently invented in human history.

Прям мысли мои прочитали, как раз хотел начать разбираться в языках индейцев. Спасибо!!!

This channel is a treasure honestly. Thank you for making the efforts that most wouldn't.

Ура, у меня только что появилось занятие на ближайший час

17:35 I think it's worth noting that much of this is NOT accurate to the other member of the language family, shown on maps but not mentioned in the video- Kiowa. Sometimes the family is referred to as Kiowa-Tanoan. And the inclusion of Kiowa is quite secure, with clear sound correspondences (especially for stem-initial consonants). The Kiowa are, however, not a Puebloan people, they live on the plains (historically migrating from around Montana to around Oklahoma, as shown on the map). Their language is not secret, is much easier to find resources for, and is even purposefully taught to outsiders (notably, being offered as a class at the University of Oklahoma). It has few native speakers, but is worthy of discussion.

it's insane how homo sapiens came from africa, and that continent is dominated by a few families, whilst recently settled america had SO much diversity

Quileute - (kwil-ee-oot), at least that's how I always pronounced it growing up in the area.