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From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter, and you seem to like the language family shows. I guess a lot of you want to know what languages are like around the world and how they divide into groups. And you know, I like the language family shows too. It's one of my favorite subjects. And like I've said,

I can't give you every language family. Frankly, some of them lend themselves better to this

format than others. And if I gave you all of them, it would get boring. But there are a great

many where I'd like to share with you what fascinates me about them. And one show I haven't done that some of you have asked for is a show about Native American

languages.

And of course that's not a single family, as we'll see, not by a long shot.

Nevertheless, naturally one thinks of them as a subject to themselves. And so let's do Native American

languages. What are they? What were they? What makes them interesting? You really get so very

little about these languages, except actually these days in the media, you do read quite a bit

about revitalization of Native American

languages, attempts to save them from no longer being spoken. But in a lot of that coverage,

for very understandable reasons, you really learn nothing or next to nothing about what these

languages are actually like. You would be pardoned for thinking that they lay out just like, you know, English and Spanish and German and Dutch and maybe Russian.

It's just that their words are of different shapes and they have different endings. No, there's a lot more than that.

You can learn quite a bit about language writ large by seeing how Native American languages work. Now specifically I

want to do North America. It really would be too big a subject to do the entire

Western Hemisphere. But even in North America we're not talking about a single

family because first of all, before Europeans got to this continent, by

conservative estimate there were about 300 languages spoken.

...