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The languages of North America reflect not only that continent's indigenous peoples, but the European colonization as well. The most widely spoken languages in North America (which includes Central America and the Caribbean islands) are English, Spanish, and to a lesser extent French, and especially in the Caribbean, creole languages lexified by them.
Once a trade pidgin and the most far-reaching sign language in North America, Plains Sign Talk or Plains Sign Language is now critically endangered with an unknown number of speakers. Navajo Sign Language has been found to be in use in one clan of Navajo; however, whether it is a dialect of Plains Sign Talk or a separate language remains ...
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
Over a thousand known 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).
Below are the top foreign languages studied in American institutions of higher education (i.e., colleges and universities), based on the Modern Language Association's census of fall 2021 enrollments. "Percentage" refers to each language as a percentage of total U.S. foreign language enrollments. [3]: 49
Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language. [4] It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu, and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties. [5] There are also difficulties in ...
Distribution of language families and isolates north of Mexico at first contact. ... North America, Eurasia: Na-Dene: 46 208,552 North America: Tsimshianic: 4 2,910
English is the most widely spoken language in the United States. It is an official language in 32 of the 50 U.S. states and the de facto common language used in government, education, and commerce in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and in all territories except Puerto Rico. [5]