What New World Languages are "Viable"?

Factual Questions
1

Basic question is the thread title.

Clarification: Except for the distribution of the “Eskimo” languages, those spoken aboriginally (i.e., at the time of historical contact) in the Americas are members of distinct families and stocks from those spoken in the Old World. Except for a few nutbars and the theoreticians trying to find the common ancestral language if any, nobody sees a relationship between, say, German and Navajo. Many of these languages have been driven to or near extinction by the spread of English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French throughout the Americas.

I apologize for the use of “viable”, but I do mean it in its strict metaphorical sense: the ones that can reasonably be expected to survive as the spoken medium for a significant culture group of more than a few thousand. To parallel this in quasi-familiar Old World languages, Telegu, Swahili, German, Korean, each the native language or lingua franca of millions, have reasonable expectations of long-term survival. Absent preservation efforts or highly improbable coincidences, Frisian, Liv, and Scots Gaelic do not. They may be preserved as matters of interest, “spoken” by preservationist enthusiasts in an effort to “keep the language alive,” but are unlikely to be the common medium of verbal communication of any significant culture group.

Okay, given that background, which “American Indian” languages (North and South America) are likely to survive as living tongues? And are there any other valid candidates (things like Afrikaans that have evolved a separate existence since the Age of Exploration) in the New World?

While this is an opinion question, it strikes me as GQ rather than IMHO, as having “expert opinion” valid answers?

As a secondary question, what groups do they belong to? I know I can get that answer from Ethnologue, but I’d rather not slog through San Podunquito Apache (total speakers: 6) and the like to get the answer.

2

Maybe GD. There isn’t remotely a factual answer to this question, not the least of which is that you’re asking us to predict the future. And survive how long? I don’t think any of the Native American languages will last longer than English.

3

The expanding reach of telecommunication is increasing the already fast pace of linguistic assilimation. Probably no pre-Columbian American language is going to survive as a mainstream language. Virtually all of them have been supplanted by Spanish, English, Portuguese, or French as the dominant language in the region were they are spoken. And the small groups in South America that are still relatively isolated from western culture are more vulnerable to assilimation than the groups that are already in full contact, so they’ll be overwhelmed as contact as made.

4

Aren’t there still relatively large populations in the Andes that speak Quechua?

5

The following New World (excluding Polynesian) languages or dialects are co-official in various national and subnational jurisdictions:

Quechua in Peru and Bolivia
Aymara in Bolivia
Guarani in Paraguay
Greenlandic in Greenland
Inuktitut in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut
Chipewyan, Cree, Dogrib, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuvialuktun, North Slavey, and South Slavey in the Northwest Territories (Canada)

The first three have over 1,000,000 speakers each. Greenlandic (and the closely related Inuktitut), and Cree have over 10,000 speakers each so are relatively safe for now but may not last indefinitely. Chipewyan has only 4K, Dogrib 2K, Inuinnaqtun 2K. More endangered are Gwich’in, Inuvialuktun, North and South Slavey at less than 1K each.

6

I don’t think that there’s any way to answer this definitely. You might try going through this list:

or this one:

and clicking on the names of each of the languages. I would say that any language with less than 1,000 speakers is a goner. A language with between 1,000 and 1,000,000 speakers has some chance of long-term survival. A language with more than 1,000,000 speakers has a pretty good chance of survival.

7

Incidentally, Quechua isn’t a single language but a group of related dialects. Some sources list as many as forty-six dialects. They are arranged over a geographic area of South America in a spectrum so that speakers from one village can understand the speakers, say, twenty-five miles away, but they can’t understand the speakers, say, two hundred fifty miles away. Some sources say that if you combined the various dialects into four groups, all the speakers within each of those four groups could understand each other. Some sources say that you would have to as many as a dozen groups to make sure everyone in each group understands everyone else in that group.

8

And, though it was a “long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” the fact that (ETA: a dialect of) Quechua, as spoken by Greedo, had spread that far suggests a long life for it.

9

It’s important to note, though, that the entire population of the Northwest Territories is about 42k, and Nunavut only 31k. So there’s not the same pressure on these languages that there would be if the speakers were living within a vastly larger population of non-speakers.

10

When you ask what groups they belong to, which languages are you talking about? Navajo, for instance, is generally classified as part of the Na-Dene family, which also includes a bunch of languages in Northwest Canada and Southern Alaska. But there are a lot of different language families in the Americas.

11

My thanks to everyone for the answers to date. (I’d like to hold this open for any other candidate languages.

John: While I see your point, my thought is, “It’s a reasonably good bet that Magyar will be used by Hungarians 100 years from now; not so, a language (call it Caloosa) spoken by the less-than-50 people left on a reservation in, say, Alabama. People like Wendell can make expert assessments of which languages are in the ‘Magyar’ category and which in the ‘Caloosa’ category in terms of probable survival beyond the lifetimes of current speakers.”

Wendell: Thanks for the link. Re the nature of Quechuan [which I believe is pronounced “catch Juan”], would it be fair to compare it to Hindi, which I believe is generally considered a language, but which (IIRC) has the same spectrum-of-dialects structure?

Captain Amazing: “They” means “the languages that meet my ‘viability’ standard.” I know there’s a large number of independent families of New World languages; I’m curious to know how they match up to the ‘survivors’ that answer my question. (E.g., TTBOMK Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani are all part of the ‘Andean-Equatorial’ stock [paralleling Indo-European] with the first two in the Quechumaran family [paralleling Slavic or Romance] and Guarani part of the Tupi-Guarani family within it.)

12

I wasn’t aware of the extent to which Hindi was a dialect continuum. Incidentally, here’s the Wikipedia article on about the subject:

I’m afraid that my vague answer is all I can give.

13

If you think Dutch people are stubborn, just wait til you meet a Frisian.