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Show The Place of Shoshoni among the Languages of North America When Europeans arrived, Shoshoni was one of several hundred distict languages that were spoken in North America. While some languages, such as Zuni and Washo, seem to have no close relatives, most can be grouped into language families, that is, groupings of languages that are related to each other, because they are offsprings of an ancestral language. The language family that Shoshoni belongs to is called the Uto-Aztecan language family, a large family that includes about 30 languages injvhat is now western United States and Mexico. Uto-Aztecan is just one of several large language families in North America. East of the Rocky Mountains, there are four such large families: Algonquian, Iroquoian, Muskogean and Siouan. With 80,000 speakers, Cree is the largest Algonquian language; most Crees live in Canada, but some are also in the United States. Other important Algonquian languages include Ojibwa with about 50,000 speakers, and Micmac, Potawatomi, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, each of which have a thousand or more speakers. Most of the Iroquoian languages, such as Mohawk, were spoken around the Great Lakes area; the one exception is Cherokee, an Iroquoian language that was originally spoken in the Carolinas and surrounding states, but today is spoken primarily in Oklahoma. The Muskogean languages were originally spoken in what is now the southeastern United States, but many of them now are spoken in Olkahoma. The two largest Muskogean languages are Creek and Choctaw, each with about 10,000 speakers. The Siouan languages were spoken in what is now the southeastern United States and the Great Plains, and the family includes, among others, Dakota, Crow, and Winnebago. The largest is Dakota with 15,000 or more speakers. In the eastern United States there were also a number of smaller language families, such as Caddoan, and as well as several languages such as Yuchi and Tunica, that do not seem to be related to other languages. There is greater diversity west of the Rocky Mountains. There are many small language families, along with a large number of languages which have no close relatives. But there are a few large language families. One is the Athapaskan language family, which is spoken in three distinct areas: a northern area in Alaska and northwestern Canada, a coastal area in southern Oregon and northern California, and a southwest group centered in Arizona and New Mexico. There were over 20 northern Athapaskan languages, but none of the tribes who spoke these languages were ever very large because of the harsh living conditions in the north; today the largest northern Athapaskan tribe is Chipewyan with 5,000 speakers. There were six coastal languages, each with about 1,000 speakers; all the coastal languages but Hupa of California are now extinct. The largest Athapaskan languages are in the southwest; in the 1980s there were over 150,000 Navajos, with about two thirds of them still speaking the language. The Western Apache number about 16,000, with about 12,000 still speaking the language. Salish is another large family of languages, with over 20 languages, spoken in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada. Some of these languages are Bella Coola, Chehalis, Flathead, and Coeur d'Alene. The Yuman language family includes Yuma, Diegueno, Walapai, Havasupai, Cocopa, Mohave, and several other languages of Southern California, western Arizona, and neighboring areas in Mexico. |