Americas: the language diversity problem

Ten years ago, I posted on the high diversity of languages in America, and a recent paper has added some interesting information on the subject.

The paper was published last month (June 28, 2025). It confirms the diversity and its uniqueness among the languages around the World. Furthermore, the authors can't explain why (see the bold text that I highlighted in the quote below):

"Linguistically, the Americas remain one of the most diverse parts of the world, despite the loss of many languages since European colonization (Campbell 2024). Within the Americas, the diversity of South America exceeds that of North America as measured both by the number of distinct languages as well as by the number of singular linguistic lineages (“language families”). Within South America, in turn, the Amazonian lowlands are generally more diverse than the Andes and the Southern Cone, though the uneven demographic and cultural impact of European conquest may have contributed to accentuating the observed diversity cline. About 60% of South American lineages are isolates (Seifart and Hammarström 2017), that is, consist of only one extant member whose ties with related lineages were severed at a point of time that exceeds the time horizon that can be reached by historical linguistic methods (under ideal conditions ~8000 years). This indicates high rates of linguistic diversification and cladogenesis already in an early phase of human presence. The causes of this remain poorly understood. South American languages are also characterized by extreme heterogeneity concerning their evolved sound systems and grammars—a third parameter of linguistic diversity that contributes to the overall complexity of the linguistic situation in the continent."

The paper, explored genetic and language similarities, and as you'd expect, they found "strong similarities in language and morphology between the Selk'nam and Qawaskar", the boat-people that lived in the seas of Tierra del Fuego and SW Chilean Patagonia. They were the human beings who lived furthest south in the whole World!

The Mapuche have an Amazon-Chaco origin

The paper also found affinities between Chacoan people (called Quom) and the Mapuches of Chile.

In my book, I mentioned many myths and legends of the Mapuches that are similar to myths of the natives that lived in Southern Amazonia, and the Chaco region (the Guaraní people). But the homeland of the Mapuche and the Chaco-Amazon region are nearly 1,500 miles (2,400 km) apart, with the Andes rising 6,000 m (20,000 ft.) high between them.

I also wrote a post on the subject see: Mapuche natives and their possible link to the Guarani.

The Mapuche don't like the idea of being considered as "recent" arrivals in Chile, migrants from the central South American jungles. They prefer to believe they have always lived in Chile. However, the facts are quite the opposite. This paper says:

"The Qom and Mapuche exhibit the strongest genetic similarities among the groups we studied. The Qom are a lowland group from the southern Chaco, while the Mapuche historically inhabited northern Patagonia, later expanding to the Pampas. Recent genetic studies on the Mapuche suggest that their genetic profile reflects an ancient ancestry linked to early migration waves (SNA2), followed by prolonged isolation before recent gene flow from the Central Andes (Arango-Isaza et al. 2023; Capodiferro et al. 2021). In fact, mtDNA affinities between Chaco and Andean populations have led some scholars to suggest a shared evolutionary history (Cabana et al. 2006; Russo et al. 2018). This is consistent with previous genetic studies, which have reported close biological affinities between the Qom and Mapuche (Cabana et al. 2006; Demarchi and García Ministro 2008; Sevini et al. 2013) despite the fact that they are not geographic neighbors."

Read the paper online: Menéndez, L. P., and M. Urban. 2025. “ Tracing Human Diversity in South America's Southern Cone: Linguistic, Morphometric, and Genetic Perspectives.” American Journal of Biological Anthropology 187, no. 3: e70077. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.70077.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Click Language may not be the "first" language of mankind

In previous posts I have written about languages, their diversity, out-of-Africa and the peopling of America.

I recently read an interesting article published several years ago in Scientific American (Social Clicks: Sounds Associated with African Languages Are Common in English) by Anne Pycha -February 1, 2012.

Pycha writes that:

"[English language] Speakers, it turns out, use clicks for a previously overlooked purpose: as a form of verbal punctuation in between thoughts or phrases. Melissa Wright of Birmingham City University in England recently analyzed click sounds in six large sets of recorded English conversations. She found that speakers used clicks frequently to signal that they were ending one stretch of conversation and shifting to a new one. For example, a speaker might say, “Yeah, that was a great game,” produce a click, then say, “The reason I’m calling is to invite you to dinner tomorrow.”
This pattern, which occurred for both British and American speakers, suggests that clicks have a meaning similar to saying “anyway” or “so.” That is, clicks provide us with a phonetic resource to organize conversations and communicate our intentions to listeners...".

Why is this important? Because Click languages, which are only spoken in Africa, are often portrayed as ancient languages, the "original" mother tongue of human beings.

This video shows what a Xhosa sounds like speaking in his click language.

See these scholarly articles as an example of the above notion of a primeval African click language:

• Ancient Roots for an African Language?
• History of Click-Speaking Populations of Africa Inferred from mtDNA and Y Chromosome Genetic Variation

However if clicks were overlooked in English, were they also ignored among other languages?

There was one other language outside of Africa, spoken on Mornington Island, Australia. It was called "Damin", nobody speaks it now, it became a lost language. It was spoken in until the 1800s by the initiated men of the Lardil aboriginal tribe (read more here).

The idea that click languages are the original tongue of mankind is based on a weak assumption: since these languages are used by the South African hunter-gatherers, and these people are also (see my recent post on this subject) said to be the oldest group of humans based on their mtDNA, then it must be the primeval language. But are we expected to believe that these people kept their original language while elsewhere it evolved at a rapid pace, diversifying? Why would the click-languages remain static or evolve slower?

I side with Tom Güldemann who wrote: "The idea that modern click phonemes have their ultimate origin in the linguistic feature of a very ancient human language remains just one among several speculative hypotheses."

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

The diversity of Amerindians - Purepecha from Michoacan

I have read a paper (Complex Nature of Hominin Dispersals: Ecogeographical and Climatic Evidence for Pre-Contact Craniofacial Variation, Ann H. Ross and Douglas H. Ubelaker Scientific Reportsvolume 9, Article number: 11743, 2019) that explored the differences in skull size and shape among Pre-Hispanic Amerindians from 0 CE to 1500 CE, so they are not very ancient.

One would expect cranial morphology to be influenced by inheritance (members of a group would have similar shaped skulls and faces when compared to other groups), but it is not so simple: the authors found "multifactorial forces from spatial/geographic distribution, altitude, and climate, as well as demic diffusion and drift" moulding the shape of skulls.

We'd expect many similarities among Native Americans, and differences too. The interesting find is that: "The sample from Michoacán is the most dissimilar from all of the samples", and that "The Mexican sample from Chihuahua is significantly different from all other samples" the two figures reproduced below show that this is quite true for the Michoacan natives but it does not seem so clear cut for the Chihuahuans.

From the paper.

What didn't surprise me was that the authors are aware of the "short" time allowed by current prevailing theories for these morphologic differences to develop. Not more than 15Ky. So they state: " It has been proposed that significant levels of craniofacial diversification that occurred in a relatively short time span observed in southern South America cannot be fully explained by drift alone and it was concluded that random factors such as directional selection and phenotypic plasticity should also be considered".

But, what if... these changes took place over longer periods of time? I will leave this question open.

The present inhabitants of Michoacan in Mexico are known as Purepechas or Tarascas. They are a Native American group, with a curious history.

In Geographical Origins of the Tarascans, Vincent H. Malström, Geographical Review Vol. 85, No. 1, January 1995, the American Geographical Society of New York, we find out that "only after the conquest of Michoacán was completed did the Spanish begin to perceive how different the people were from their neighbors to the east. In some ways the former were far more primitive than the Aztecs. They depended on hunting and fishing to the degree that the Aztec term for the region, Michoacán, meant "place of the fishermen." Their religion centered on the worship of fire and of the moon, and they had a rudimentary counting system based on five. Their calendar was a simplistic copy of that used by their neighbors. The temples they constructed looked like nothing else in Mesoamerica; their language was unrelated to that of any people in the region; and their manner of dress differed markedly from all other indigenous peoples in Mexico."

This paper adds that " the Spanish learned that the Tarascans called themselves Purepecha, which in their tongue meant "the latecomers" or "the recent arrivals." The term piqued the Spaniards' curiosity, and they immediately set about questioning the elders of the tribe as to where they had come from and when. As a preliterate people totally dependent on oral tradition, the Purépecha had no way to record their history in written form, except by drawing pictures. Consequently the Spanish had them summarize the legend of their migration on a piece of linen called the Lienzo de Jucutácato, which was not rediscovered until the 1870s (Craine and Reindorp 1970, x). It purports to explain how the Purépecha journeyed from a homeland far to the south to their current abode in Michoacán. Though historically the Lienzo is considered a priceless document, geographically it has to be one of the most farfetched reconstructions."

So they are "latecomers" with different culture, traditions and language; that came from somewhere else. This paper proposes a South American origin: "A primary assumption is that the Purépecha language is related to Quechua, the native tongue of the Incas (Adams 1991, 324). The obvious implication is that the Purépecha did come from South America, though not necessarily from Cuzco and certainly not by way of the Orinoco delta and Veracruz. Although a recent classification of Mesoamerican Ianguages relates Purépecha to Chibcha in Colombia rather than to Quechua (Greenberg 1987), the point remains the same - the closest antecedents of the Purépecha language are found in South America.".

But if this was the case, these Purepechas would be more similar to the Peruvian skulls and they are very different.

Other authors state that the links to Quechua, Mayan or Chibcha are tenuous (see Raina Heaton in Language Isolates).

I have not been able to find clear genetic information on the Purepecha, but when I do I will post it here.

To be continued...

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

Language diversity (or the lack of it) does not support the Out of Africa theory

The diversity of human languages has been something that has always interested me -maybe I was really impressed back in Sunday school with the Tower of Babel story from the Bible.

But the biblical explanation in Genesis 11:1-9 is in itself an attempt at explaining the origin of the different languages we speak:

(from Genesis 11:1-9 English Standard Version), the bold highlight is mine:
"1. Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.
2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
3 And they said to one another, 'Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.' And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
4 Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.'
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built.
6 And the Lord said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.'
8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused[a] the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth."

So the idea of an "original" language which -in this case, due to divine intervention- became many, is very old indeed.

Now we know that languages evolve and change, as is the case of migrating people isolated from each other, even during short periods of time (think about British English and Australian English where "city" is pronounced "siddy" by the Aussies and "sity" by the Brits).

Even one established society as time goes by finds its language modified, an example is the "Great Vowel Shift" in British English between the 1300s and the 1600s, where vowels literally changed as we can see in the following sonnet by William Shakespeare (Sonnet 47):

With my love's picture then my eye doth feast,
And to the painted banquet bids my heart;
Another time mine eye is my heart's guest,
...
So either by thy picture or my love
Thyself away are resent still with me
For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move
And I am still with them and they with me

Back then, "guest" rhymed with "feast" and "love" with "move"!

Today I came across a paper that tries to use something called "phonemic diversity" to prove the Out of Africa theory of human origins.

It was published by Quentin D. Atkinson in April 2011: Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa, Science 15 Apr 2011: Vol. 332, Issue 6027, pp. 346-349 DOI: 10.1126/science.1199295. And very boldly claims that:

"Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages".

In other words, the further you move away from Africa -according to Atkinson- languages have less phonemes, in a similar manner as bottlenecks restrict genetic diversity, a similar effect affects language.

I am not too sure if I agree with Atkinson's idea, but I didn't have to look too far to find an excellent rebuttal of this theory: Asya Pereltsvaig wrote a great post in her blog which summarizes its detailed analysis as follows:"All in all, the Science article by Atkinson on phomenic diversity seems to be yet another example of shoddy work in which mathematical methods are applied in a simplistic fashion, without any understanding of concepts and phenomena under consideration. Such works produce results that contradicts well-known facts about the nature of human languages, as well as plain common sense".

In fact, there are several language hotspots outside of Africa, such as the Caucasus, Papua New Guinea and, the Americas (yes, the "last" place to be colonized by our errant ancestors -yes Polynesia is younger still, but America is the last big place to have been reached in the purported Out of Africa event).

I haven't been able to find any papers on the evolution of languages, a "clock" that can be used to explain why America supposedly first reached by humans 15 kya has roughly the same diversity as New Guinea which was reached 50 kya or the Caucasus and Southern Asia, which were populated by H. sapiens even earlier!

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

More on language diversity

I came across the map shown below, and I found it very similar to the map that I included in my previous post on Language diversity: it has the same clusters in Papua New Guinea, Amazonia and northern South America, South East Asia and Equatorial Africa. But! it depicted another thing, "Tone diversity".

The website that published that map has a very interesting post: Phonemic diversity decays "out of Africa"? (April 16, 2011)

Yes, the red dots are higher in Africa, S.E. Asia and PNG, but none in north Asia or Europe, and quite a few in America. Regarding the pink dots, America has more than the putative cradle od Amerindians (Siberia) or Europe.

The blog is very good as it makes fun of the paper it is criticizing.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2015 by Austin Whittall © 

Language diversity and the peopling of America

For years I have wondered why do Native American people speak so many languages? They supposedly reached the New World recently (i.e. 15,000 years ago) yet evolved over 40% of the global languages! A figure higher than that found in Africa, the "cradle of Mankind".

Africans have had the time (they are supposedly the oldest humans) and the advantage of not going through bottlenecks (I do imagine that bottleneck that wipes out genetic diversity does the same to languages... kill the speakers and the language dies), so they should have evolved most languages than any other group of humans. But they have not.

The diversity of Languages: highest in America. From [1]

Then we have the island of divesity in New Guinea has the highest language diversity in the whole world! 820 languages out of a global total of around 7,000. That is 1 language every 820 Papuans.

I found that quite reasonable, the island is a jungle, with many mountain ranges that isolate populations and keep them from mixinng. New Guinea has been considered as one of the first places reached by mankind during our epic trek out of Africa.

But America is different, we are newcomers. The Papuans had 50 ky to develop their languages, the Amerindians less than 15 ky. So how do we explain this?

To make matters worse, America's native population fell to half or even less during the period of discovery and conquest. How many languages were wiped out before even being discovered? Even so, it has the highest global language diversity.

The origin of languages

Human beings speak, and we are all aware that Chinese and English sound different, that Spanish, Italian and French may seem similar but are also different. We are humans and speak different languages despite having a common origin.

An early attempt to explain this can be found in the Bible (Genesis 11: 1- 9): "... But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, 'If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.'" So God made us all speak different languages by an act of his almighty power. Neat and simple.

But we now know that humans originated longe before any ziggurats were built in Mesopotamia. Language is something that arose tens of thousands of years ago. According to Chomsky, Tattersall, Bolhuis and Berwick (2014), "The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000–100,000 years ago" [3]. Of course (I have posted on this before) that date range is not inferred from language studies, it is taken from the date suggested by anthropologists as the date of emergence of Modern Homo sapiens. So if that date was not correct, then the date given for the origin of languages is also incorrect.

In fact, our next of kin, the Neanderthals, could and did speak: "From the consilience of evidence from anatomy, archeology, and DNA, one can conclude that some language abilities, if not necessarily full modern syntactic language, were present in Neanderthals" so perhaps the ability to speak in Neanderthals predates that in humans. [4]

Daniel Nettle [2] suggests that people living near the Equator live easier lives regarding food supply and can split into smaller groups, which favours creation of new languages: "Where the climate allows continuous food production throughout the year, small groups of people can be reliably self-sufficient and so populations fragment into many small languages. Where the variability of the climate is greater, the size of social network necessary for reliable subsistence is larger, and so languages tend to be more widespread."

And this makes sense, as you can see in the map below, language diversity is highest close to the warm equatorial areas:

The diversity of Languages: location of highest densities. A. Whittall

Interesting, but this explains the evolution of languages during the last 11,000 years after the discovery of agriculture. I cannot imagine a large society of hunter-gatherers all speaking the same language, but one of farmers and tax collectors does make more sense.

But how fast do languages evolve? Take Australian English and English English or American English. They Aussies and Americans split from the mother tongue between 250 and 400 years ago, and did keep in touch with the distant British Metropolis yet evolved distinct stress and intonation for the same words. Something similar has happened with Spanish in the different Latin American countries and Spain over the past 500 years. But change has been small perhaps due to the lack of isolation.

The image above, from L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza & Marcus W. Feldman clearly shows that American languages are different to those in Asia, the "source" of the Native Americans' ancestors. This is surely conveniently explained by the "Beringian standstill" (how convenient) which allowed the future Amerindians to differentiate from those remaining behind in Asia.

Last but not least, I usually read that all indicators of genetic diversity fall as you move away from Africa, a clear indication of an African origin for all human beings. But, this is not seen in the case of human language diversity. Why?

I do believe that we should look into language diversity as an indicator of an older origin for mankind as a whole and for an earlier date for the peopling of America.

For those interesting in reading about this subject in depth, German Dziebel has written about linguistic diversity in support of his Out of America theory. Read More, and see an analysis of it here.

Sources

[1] Mobility and Ancient Society in Asia and the Americas, pp 117-126, chapter " How America Was Colonized: Linguistic Evidence. Johanna Nichols
[2] Explaining Global Patterns of Language Diversity, Daniel Nettle, journal of anthropological archaeology 17, 354–374 (1998) article no. AA98032
[3] Bolhuis JJ, Tattersall I, Chomsky N, Berwick RC (2014) >How Could Language Have Evolved? PLoS Biol 12(8): e1001934. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934
[4] Language Abilities in Neanderthals By:Johansson, S (Johansson, Sverker) ANNUAL REVIEW OF LINGUISTICS, VOL 1 Book Series: Annual Review of Linguistics Volume: 1 Pages: 311-332 DOI: 10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124945 Published: 2015

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2015 by Austin Whittall ©