Art of the Americas

Amerind languages

Amerind is a rejected higher-level language family proposed by Joseph Greenberg in 1960 and elaborated by his student Merritt Ruhlen. Greenberg proposed that all of the indigenous languages of the Americas belong to one of three language families, the previously established Eskimo–Aleut and Na–Dene, and with everything else—otherwise classified by specialists as belonging to dozens of independent families—as Amerind. Because of a large number of methodological issues with the 1987 book Language in the Americas, the relationships he proposed between these languages have been rejected by historical linguists as spurious. The term Amerind is also occasionally used to refer broadly to the various indigenous languages of the Americas without necessarily implying that they are a genealogical group. To avoid ambiguity, the term Amerindian is often used to refer to the latter meaning.

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See also

• ▸Aztec society
• ▸Christianity in Australia
• ▸History of painting

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