Endangered Languages in North America

Language is the primary means of human communication by which we share ideas, knowledge, and identity as well as pass them from generation to generation. There are approximately 7,000 languages currently spoken around the globe, but it is expected that half of them will not survive the next 80 years. When the last fluent speaker of a language dies, their culture loses centuries of knowledge, traditions, and ways of seeing the world.

Language loss is often related to oppression. From the year 1492 to the 1800s, Europeans colonized the Americas during what they called the “Age of Exploration.” During this time, colonizers from several European countries explored and claimed the natural resources and human capital already present. This caused the displacement, enslavement, and genocide of many Indigenous peoples of the Americas. One major component of that colonization was linguistic conquest. By eliminating or outlawing the use of a certain language, colonizers are able to reduce the chance of a cultural group surviving domination.

For communities whose languages have been nearly or completely eliminated, preservation or restoration is vitally important to maintaining their cultural identities, their values, and their heritage. Various organizations are helping to restore these languages to their previous state, like Wikitongues and the Endangered Languages Project. 

North America is considered one of the most linguistically diverse continents in the world, with about 400 languages spoken within its borders. However, over 200 of those languages are endangered or otherwise at risk and featured on this map.

This map illustrates the number and location of endangered languages in North America. The map uses unique values to represent each category that the Endangered Languages Project has defined: at risk, vulnerable, endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered, dormant, and awakening.

Many factors go into determining the category into which a language will fall. These include the number of native or fluent speakers of the language, the number of people who learned that language as their first language (also called L1 speakers), the age of the speakers, the proportion of the total ethnic population that speaks the language, among other things. The map below presents the North American languages that have been identified as belonging to one of these categories. "Awakening" languages are typically dialects that are beginning to form or once-dormant languages that have returned due to revitalization efforts. These languages, though on an upward trend unlike languages belonging to the other categories on this map, are considered quite fragile in their initial stages and are therefore represented here.

The data for this map comes from the Endangered Languages Project (https://www.endangeredlanguages.com/lang/region). In studying this map, it is important to consider the fact that languages are not confined by geography. This map represents each language as a single point, but languages can spread out, even across the globe, just as their speakers can. Points are used here merely for clarity and organization and in no way are the points meant to imply that a language is restricted to that specific region.

The goal of this map of endangered languages is to draw attention to the legacy of colonization. Too often we think of colonization as having ended at the close of the "Age of Exploration," but its effects are still causing problems for North American Indigenous and minority communities today.