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24-616: Henri Wittmann (1991) assigned DSL to the French Sign Language family because of similarities in vocabulary. Peter Atke Castberg studied deaf education in Europe for two years (1803–1805), including at l'Épée 's school in Paris , and founded the first deaf school in Denmark in 1807, where Danish Sign Language (DTS) developed. The exact relationship between DTS and Old French Sign Language (VLSF)

48-435: A further 16% were similar but not the same. Faroese Sign Language and Greenlandic Sign Language are more clearly dialects of DSL. ^b Denotes the number (if known) of languages within the family. No further information is given on these languages. Henri Wittmann Henri Wittmann (born 1937) is a Canadian linguist from Quebec . He is best known for his work on Quebec French . Henri (Hirsch) Wittmann

72-891: Is Joseph Greenberg 's Amerind hypothesis, which, however, nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation , contact , and coincidence. According to UNESCO , most of the Indigenous languages of the Americas are critically endangered, and many are dormant (without native speakers but with a community of heritage-language users) or entirely extinct. The most widely spoken Indigenous languages are Southern Quechua (spoken primarily in southern Peru and Bolivia) and Guarani (centered in Paraguay, where it shares national language status with Spanish), with perhaps six or seven million speakers apiece (including many of European descent in

96-586: Is limited to certain regions where the languages are most spoken. Although sometimes enshrined in constitutions as official, the languages may be used infrequently in de facto official use. Examples are Quechua in Peru and Aymara in Bolivia, where in practice, Spanish is dominant in all formal contexts. In the North American Arctic region, Greenland in 2009 elected Kalaallisut as its sole official language. In

120-580: Is not known; Castberg was critical of l'Épée's 'methodical signs' and also receptive to local sign language in 1807, and may thus have introduced signs from VLSF to a pre-existing local language (or home sign (s)) rather than derived DTS from VLSF itself. In any case, Castberg introduced a one-handed manual alphabet in 1808 that was based on the Spanish manual alphabet . In 1977, the Danish Deaf Association adopted 'the international manual alphabet', which

144-625: The Linguistic Society of America (LSA). In 1965, he cofounded with André Rigault and Douglas Ellis the Linguistics Department at McGill University. In 1981, he was the cofounder, with Normand Beauchemin and Robert Fournier , of the Linguistic Society of Quebec ( Association québécoise de linguistique ) which he served for 10 years as president, secretary general and organizer of the annual meeting. In 1981 as well, he became

168-513: The Quechuan languages , Aymara , Guarani , and Nahuatl , which had millions of active speakers, to many languages with only several hundred speakers. After pre-Columbian times, several Indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas, based on European, Indigenous and African languages. The European colonizing nations and their successor states had widely varying attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars learned and promoted

192-750: The Tupi language . In many Spanish colonies, Spanish missionaries often learned local languages and culture in order to preach to the natives in their own tongue and relate the Christian message to their Indigenous religions. In the British American colonies, John Eliot of the Massachusetts Bay Colony translated the Bible into the Massachusett language , also called Wampanoag, or Natick (1661–1663); he published

216-661: The Université de Sherbrooke . He retired from teaching in 1997, after an extensive tour of teaching and conferencing in France . In the following years, he became the first Director of the Presses universitaires de Trois-Rivières and emeritus researcher at the Centre d’Analyse des Littératures Francophones des Amériques (CALIFA) at Carleton University in Ottawa . As a comparatist, Wittmann contributed to

240-547: The 11th century (with the Nordic settlement of Greenland and failed efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador ) and the end of the 15th century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus ). Several Indigenous cultures of the Americas had also developed their own writing systems , the best known being the Maya script . The Indigenous languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from

264-457: The 2010 census. In Canada, 133,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in the 2011 census. In Greenland, about 90% of the population speaks Greenlandic , the most widely spoken Eskaleut language . Over a thousand known languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of

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288-568: The Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples . Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct . The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other; instead, they are classified into a hundred or so language families and isolates , as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified due to the lack of information on them. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most widely reported

312-484: The Americas by European settlers and administrators, had become the official or national languages of modern nation-states of the Americas. Many Indigenous languages have become critically endangered, but others are vigorous and part of daily life for millions of people. Several Indigenous languages have been given official status in the countries where they occur, such as Guaraní in Paraguay . In other cases official status

336-1142: The Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages. The first Commissioner of Indigenous languages in Canada is Ronald E. Ignace . Colombia Colombia delegates local Indigenous language recognition to the department level according to the Colombian Constitution of 1991 . Bolivia Corrientes , Argentina Tacuru , Mato Grosso do Sul , Brazil Mercosur Peru (Official Language) Jujuy , Argentina Comunidad Andina Peru (Official Language) Comunidad Andina Belize Mexico Mexico Belize Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Colombia ( Cauca , Nariño , Putumayo ) La Guajira , Colombia Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto) , Mexico Mexico Honduras ( Gracias

360-647: The United States, the Navajo language is the most spoken Native American language, with more than 200,000 speakers in the Southwestern United States . The US Marine Corps recruited Navajo men, who were established as code talkers during World War II. In American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America (1997), Lyle Campbell lists several hypotheses for the historical origins of Amerindian languages. Roger Blench (2008) has advocated

384-485: The case of Guarani). Only half a dozen others have more than a million speakers; these are Aymara of Bolivia and Nahuatl of Mexico, with almost two million each; the Mayan languages Kekchi , Quiché , and Yucatec of Guatemala and Mexico, with about 1 million apiece; and perhaps one or two additional Quechuan languages in Peru and Ecuador. In the United States, 372,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in

408-472: The fifties, has been the first to apply the latter's principles of chain reactions in phonology to inflectional morphology . In Wittmann's view, the basic structure of the sentence is held together by functional items , with the lexical items filling in the blanks. Amerindian languages The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of

432-600: The first Bible printed in North America, the Eliot Indian Bible . The Europeans also suppressed use of Indigenous languages, establishing their own languages for official communications, destroying texts in other languages, and insisted that Indigenous people learn European languages in schools. As a result, Indigenous languages suffered from cultural suppression and loss of speakers. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch, brought to

456-567: The first Editor of the Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée , a responsibility he assumed for the following 20 years. Politically, Wittmann is known for his anarcho-syndicalist sympathies with strong links to the CNTU ( Confederation of National Trade Unions ), communautary and anti-war movements. In 1974-1978, he was at the center of a union conflict at the University of Quebec which changed

480-417: The landscape of collective bargaining in the academic world. A specialist of the linguistic heritage of Quebec, he also is a stout defender of Quebec independence. Henri Wittmann is the first modern linguist to study non-standard forms of Quebec French (notably Joual , Magoua and Chaouin ) in a theory-orientated and comparative framework. In a general way, Wittmann, a student of André Martinet in

504-413: The study of the morphology of a number of languages and language families: Pre-Indo-European, Indo-European ( Hittite , Italic , Romance , Germanic , Creole ), Afro-Asiatic ( Egyptian ), African ( Mande , Kwa , Bantu ), Austronesian ( Malagasy , Polynesian ), Amerindian ( Arawakan , Cariban ). His work between 1963 and 2002 includes more than 140 items. He is a life member since 1962 of

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528-653: The theory of multiple migrations along the Pacific coast of peoples from northeastern Asia, who already spoke diverse languages. These proliferated in the New World. Countries like Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Guyana recognize most Indigenous languages. Bolivia and Venezuela give all Indigenous languages official status. Canada, Argentina, and the U.S. allow provinces and states to decide. Brazil limits recognition to localities. Canada Bill C-91, passed in 2019, supports Indigenous languages through sustainable funding and

552-528: Was an almost exact copy of the American manual alphabet , with minor differences and additional signs for the æ, ø and å. Norwegian Sign Language is generally thought to be a descendant of DSL. However, it may well be a mixture of DSL and indigenous sign, parallel to the situation between Swedish Sign Language and Finnish Sign Language . Icelandic Sign Language is closer; 37% of a set of analyzed signs (Aldersson 2006) were completely different in structure and

576-721: Was born in Alsace in 1937. After studying with André Martinet at the Sorbonne , he moved to North America and taught successively at the University of Colorado at Boulder , the University of Alberta in Edmonton, the University of Windsor and McGill University in Montreal before teaching in the French university system of Quebec , the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and at Rimouski as well as

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