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Amazonian languages is the term used to refer to the indigenous languages of "Greater Amazonia." This area is significantly larger than the Amazon and extends from the Atlantic coast all the way to the Andes, while its southern border is usually said to be the Paraná. The region is inhabited by societies that share many cultural traits but whose languages are characterized by great diversity. There are about 330 extant languages in Greater Amazonia, almost half of which have fewer than 500 speakers. Meanwhile, only Guajiro has a six-digit number of speakers (about 300,000). Of the 330 total languages, about fifty are isolates, while the remaining ones belong to about 25 different families. Most of the posited families have few members. It is this distribution of many small and historically unrelated speech communities that makes Amazonia one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world. The precise reasons for this unusual diversity have not yet been conclusively determined, but it is noteworthy that Amazonian languages seem to have had fewer than 10,000 native speakers even before the invasion of European colonists wrought havoc on the societies by which they were spoken. Despite the large-scale diversity, the long-term contact among many of the languages of Greater Amazonia has created similarities between many neighboring languages that are not genetically related.〔Epps and Michael, 2015, p. 1〕 == Introduction == A variety of macro-groupings have been suggested for the Amazonian languages families, like the one suggested by Joseph Greenberg; however, these theories are not widely supported.〔Aikhenvald, 2012, pg.1〕 Often, similarities between languages are due to language contact rather than due to genetic relationship. This illustrates that a lack of contact between communities is not necessary to maintain linguistic diversity.〔Epps and Michael, 2015, p. 1〕 A vast amount of linguistic research is presently being undertaken to better understand the relations between the languages of Greater Amazonia. Of the above-mentioned 25 or so language families, the following six are the major ones: * Tupian: consisting of 70-80 languages. The languages belonging to the largest sub-group, Tupí-Guaraní, are spoken almost across the entire northern half of South America. Their most prominent typological feature is an intricate system of person marking on verbs. * Macro-Jê: consisting of 30-40 languages, largely spoken in the southeast of the region, with some outliers closer to the Basin. The languages have unusually large vowel and unusually small consonant inventories. * Cariban: consisting of 40-50 languages. They are mostly found in the very north of South America, with some outliers closer to the Basin. * Arawakan: consisting of 70-80 languages. They cluster in the south, west and northwest of the region. Some important typological features are possession marking on nouns and split intransitivity based on verb type (active vs. stative). * Panoan: consisting of 30-40 languages, mostly in the south and southwest of the region. Some of their main characteristics are split alignment and complex switch reference systems. * Tukanoan: consisting of 20-30 languages, which are overwhelmingly spoken in the southern half of Colombia. The languages are known, amongst other things, for their extensive evidential and noun classifier systems. Multilingualism was (and is) the norm among Amazonian Indians. In fact, the value that many inhabitants of Amazonia assign to multilingualism is sometimes seen as a reason for the longevity of the linguistic diversity in the region. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Amazonian languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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