Título: Indigenous languages of the Americas
Seção: Background
Background: Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses that constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families, as well as many language isolates and unclassified languages. Many proposals to group these into higher-level families have been made, such as Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis. This scheme is rejected by nearly all specialists, due to the fact that some of the languages differ too significantly to draw any connections between them.

Conteúdo: Thousands of languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of the 11th century (with the Nordic settlement of Greenland and failed efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador) and the end of the 15th century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus). Several indigenous cultures of the Americas had also developed their own writing systems, the best known being the Maya script. The indigenous languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from the Quechuan languages, Aymara, Guarani, and Nahuatl, which had millions of active speakers, to many languages with only several hundred speakers. After pre-Columbian times, several indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas, based on European, indigenous and African languages.  The European colonizers and their successor states had widely varying attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars learned and promoted the Tupi language. In many Latin American colonies, Spanish missionaries often learned local languages and culture in order to preach to the natives in their own tongue and relate the Christian message to their indigenous religions. In the British American colonies, John Eliot of the Massachusetts Bay Colony translated the Bible into the Massachusett language, also called Wampanoag, or Natick (1661-1663; he published the first Bible printed in North America, the Eliot Indian Bible.  The E

user: What was the background of the Indigenous languages of the Americas?

assistant: various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of the 11th century

user: Which language was typically spoken?

assistant: The Europeans also suppressed use of indigenous American languages,

user: What were the cultures like?

assistant: Several indigenous cultures of the Americas had also developed their own writing systems, the best known being the Maya script.

user: What year was this developed?

assistant: These encounters occurred between the beginning of the 11th century (with the Nordic settlement of Greenland and failed efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador) and the end of the 15th century

user: Did Greenland speak a certain language?

assistant: Greenland in 2009 adopted Kalaallisut as its sole official language.

user: Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?

assistant: Many indigenous languages have become critically endangered,