The native languages of the Americas are classified into three large families:

• Amerindian
• Na-Dene
• Eskimo-Aleut

The origins of all three lie in the three migratory waves which, according to the most widely accepted theories, entered the continent through the Bering Strait some 18,000 years ago. 

These three families are in turn divided into a large number of significantly different groups: 

The Amerindian family is probably the most diverse on the planet, that is to say the one that is subdivided into the largest number of language groups: it has around 600 languages belonging to more than 100 groups. 

The roots of this diversification lie in two factors: the enormous expanse of territory, covering as it does all of South America, Central America and a fair part of North America (apart from the zones occupied by the other two language families), and the isolation of the people living on the continent. 

In the north of the continent is the Algonquian group, with languages such as Arapaho, Cherokee and Dakota. More towards the centre is the Uto-Aztecan group, featuring Comanche and Náhuatl. In the Andean region there is Quichua, the most-spoken indigenous language on the continent with more than 10 million speakers, together with Aymara and Mapudungun. Guaraní and Tupi are in the Equatorial-Tucano group. On both banks of the Amazon river there are also the Ge, Panoan and Carib groups, which include languages currently with very few speakers such as Culina (Ge), Marubo (Panoan) and Panare (Carib).

The second family, Na-Dene, extends across Alaska and western Canada. In addition to isolated languages, it contains the Athapaskan group which includes Navaho and Apache.

Finally the Eskimo-Aleut family occupies the northern strip of the continent from Alaska to Greenland. The Eskimo group contains languages such as Inuit and Yupik.

The enormous linguistic diversity of the Americas has been reduced since the arrival of Columbus in 1492 as a result of colonisation. Just to give one example, it is calculated that there had previously been some 1,200 languages in Brazil. At present there are only around 170, most of which are in an advanced process of extinction. 

Guaraní is the only Amerindian language which is official throughout an American state: Paraguay. Other languages are either not official at all or have co-official status in part of a territory, as is the case with Quichua and Aymara in Peru. The official languages in all the states in the Americas are one or more of the languages brought to the continent by Europeans: Spanish, English, French, Portuguese and Dutch. 

The Europeans also exported products which were hitherto unknown in Europe and consequently the names used to refer to them as well. This is the origin of words such as potato (Quichua) and tomato and chocolate (Náhuatl), as well as names of animals such as piranha (Tupi), and other terms including hurricane (Taino) and anorak (Inuit), among many others.