590 language: The Americas arrival in South Africa took place before the 15th century, based on the reliable hypothesis that speakers of Bantu languages replaced the predominant Khoi-San speakers over a very vast area, covering much of southern Africa beyond the borders of present-day South Africa The hypothesis that Bantu replaced Khoi-San is reinforced by the continuing presence of two small Khoi-San-speaking communities in central Tanzania called Hatsa and Sandawe It is reasonable to conclude that this linguistic transition must have taken quite some time and continued into the period of European arrival in South Africa The Americas by Michael J O’Neal Several challenges prevent the compilation of an accurate inventory of the languages in use in the Americas during the centuries before the arrival of the Europeans The first is that with the exception of Mayan, from Mesoamerica, none of the languages of North, Central, or South America was written down The second challenge relates to the definition of a language as opposed to a dialect, a definition that is based on the degree of difference between sets of spoken words and is thus often a matter of judgment Third, as communities spread throughout the Americas, they were separated by distance and geographical barriers that isolated them from one another— to the extent that peoples who lived just 100 miles apart could not understand each other’s language Nonetheless, linguists can trace similarities between the grammars and vocabularies of languages, and these similarities suggest that languages can be grouped into families Languages belonging to a family descended from the same earlier community of speakers and then developed differences in much the same way that American and Australian English diverged from that of England A fourth challenge in the tallying of American languages is that no sharply defined borders separated language speakers Rather, the outer edges of the territories in which peoples lived were ill defined and often overlapping; over the centuries, communities of speakers moved to new territories In a number of cases, language families spread out over areas that were not geographically continuous; a good example is the Muskogean language family, which is spoken in much of the southeastern United States, including northern and southern Florida but not the central part of the state Finally, while most of the languages spoken by Native Americans early in the second millennium continue to be spoken in the third millennium, the number of people who speak them is small and shrinking, with often only hundreds or dozens speaking a given language Until recently, one such language was spoken by only two surviving people who happened to be sisters Historians estimate that late in the pre-Columbian period, about a thousand languages were spoken in the Americas—perhaps 220 or so in North America, nearly 300 in Mesoamerica and Central America, and almost 500 in South America In North America, Mesoamerica, and Central America were some nine major language families (with linguists disagreeing about the precise number) as well as an assortment of other smaller families and individual languages that have yet to be classified and may have been unique The northernmost one is called Eskimo-Aleut, spoken by people who inhabited the Alaskan coastlines and a band of coastal land that stretched across northern Canada into Greenland To their south was a large area of modern-day Alaska and Canada (including the Northwest Territory, the Yukon, and the northern portions of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) that was home to speakers of the Athabaskan languages, a group of at least 45 languages generally divided into the northern, central, and southern branches The northern group has been a particular challenge for linguists because the people were largely nomadic The largest North American language family geographically was Algic, a group of 30 languages spoken by numerous groups in a large swath that extended through most of southern Canada to northeast Canada and down through the eastern half of the American Midwest and large portions of New England The speakers of languages in this group included the ancestors of numerous peoples whose names are well known, including the Cree, Algonquin, and Blackfeet This language region surrounded a region in which the Iroquoian languages were spoken, a group of 11 languages spoken by such nations as the Iroquois, Mohawk, and Cherokee primarily in western New England, parts of lower Canada, and small regions of the upper American South Largely in the western portion of the Midwest and into the Rocky Mountain region, 17 Siouan languages were spoken by the Sioux, Crow, and numerous other groups The most prominent of these languages remains Dakotan A more eastern Siouan branch included languages spoken as far to the east as the Ohio Valley and as far south as Mississippi In northwestern America and southwestern Canada the Salishan (or Salish) languages predominated, a name taken from a specific language spoken in Montana These languages, some dozens of them isolated from one another by the region’s rivers, inlets, and islands, were spoken by numerous other peoples, including the Coeur d’Alene and Spokane To the south were the Uto-Aztecan languages, spoken by groups in parts of California and throughout Nevada, Utah, and other portions of the American Southwest into Mexico The names of numerous U.S states are taken from these Native American languages and language families These