500 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE LANGUAGES OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS 

 Bt De. a. l. kroeber 



CUBATOB OP ANTHEOPOLOGT, UNIVBESITY OF CALIFOENIA 



THE day is past when educated people believed that the Indian lan- 

 guages were only random jargons of a few inarticulate sounds, 

 without grammar or order, and so badly in ueftd of supplementary 

 gestures to make them intelligible that the Indians could not converse 

 in the dark. Still farther have we got beyond the point of speaking of 

 the Indian language, as if all tribes used essentially one and the same 

 idiom. Such notions may yet linger among the uncultured, and now 

 and then reflections of them still crop up in books written by authors 

 whose knowledge is not first hand. But the progress of science haa 

 been so great in the last half century that the world now looks upon 

 the tongues of the native Americans with newer and sounder ideas. 



Probably the most important and most surprising fact about Ameri- 

 can Indian languages is their enormous number. On the North Ameri- 

 can continent there were spoken probably 1,000, and possibly even more 

 different languages and dialects. Of South America we know less, but 

 everything points to an equal linguistic variety on that continent. The 

 tremendous total is astounding because the aboriginal population in 

 both continents certainly numbered fewer millions than are to-day 

 found in many single European countries in which only one language 

 prevails. The twenty-five or fifty millions of American Indians pos- 

 sessed as many different languages as the billion or more inhabitants of 

 the old world. 



Language and History 



To the historian and the ethnologist this linguistic diversity is of 

 the utmost consequence, because it affords him his most important 

 means of classifying the native peoples of America, and ascertaining 

 their connections, their migrations and in part even their origins. 



To the student of old-world history and ethnology, philology is also 

 a serviceable handmaid, though to a less degree than in America. This 

 happens, in the first place, because the languages of the eastern hemi- 

 sphere are, on the whole, each more widely spread; and secondly, be- 

 cause history and archeology carry our knowledge of many peoples of 

 Europe, Asia and Africa back for thousands of years — as compared 

 with the bare four centuries since the discovery of America. History 

 is, therefore, much more able to stand on its own feet in the old world 

 than in the new. Nevertheless, when the historian goes back to origins. 



