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Show The Place of Shoshoni... " 2 ' The only other large language family in western America is Uto-Aztecan, which is considered in more detail later. All of the other languages belong to small language families, or are single languages with no close linguistic relatives. Mexico and Central America contain a very large number of languages and many language families. The best know is Mayan, with some 30 languages spoken in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Another important family is Uto-Aztecan, the family which Shoshoni belongs to. Since the arrival of Europeans to North America, many Indian groups have moved from their original homeland. Some moved freely, such as the Comanche into the Plains in search of the buffalo, which were hunted more easily once the Comanche got the horse. But most movement was forced, particularly with the placement of Indian groups onto Reservations. The most notable cases have been the forced relocations to Oklahoma. A number of languages are spoken in Oklahoma by people far from their homeland, languages such as Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Yuchi, and several Algonquian languages. There are a number of languages that have become extinct, which is to say there are no longer any speakers. In some cases, it is difficult to find any trace of the people who spoke that language, as for example Narragansett which was spoken in Rhode Island, and Yana of northern California. But there are many other cases like the Catawbas of the Carolinas who no longer speak their language, but they still maintain their identity as a people. In other cases, only adults speak the language, often rather elderly adults. This is the fate of most of the 70 or so languages of California. And then there are cases in which most or at least some of the children either speak or understand the language. Shoshoni and the Uto-Aztecan Language Family The language family that Shoshoni belongs to is called Uto-Aztecan, a large and important family found in western America, Mexico, and Central America. The parent language, which linguists and anthropologist call Proto-Uto-Aztecan, was spoken more than 5,000 years ago. The speakers of this language probably lived in or near southern California or western Arizona, where they led a wandering life, hunting and gathering wild food plants. The language slowly changed, which is something that happens to all languages over time. As people moved about, some groups lost touch with each other. Each group developed its own distinctive language variety, or dialect. In time, some of these dialects became distinct languages, which then developed into separate branches of Uto-Aztecan, which can be placed into a family tree. The branches of the Uto-Aztecan family are (starting from the south and moving north): Aztecan: Three languages belong to this branch, including Aztec (also called Nahuatl or Mexicano), which has half a million speakers. Aztec is spoken in Mexico and and Central America. It is one of the best know and best studied Indian languages. There are many scholars who have spent a life time studying this language, and there are many books, grammars, and dictionaries (most of them in Spanish) on Aztec. It is taught at a number of universities and colleges in the United States and Mexico. The variety usually studied is called Classical Aztec, which is the variety used in the Aztec Empire when the Spanish arrived in the Valley of Mexico in the early sixteenth century and which was |