Many Amerindian languages are seriously endangered.Only a handful in each continent have a substantialnumber of speakers, and even these are not growingin speaker numbers, for the most part. In this bookthere are translations from one language ofMeso-America, Nahuatl, and of half a dozen languagesfrom South America. We present the Amerindianlanguages roughly from north to south.

Náhuatl (Nahuatl in English) is one of thebest known indigenous languages of Mexico, and amajor language of the Uto-Aztecan language family.There are over one and a half million speakers. Thelanguage was spoken by the Aztecs, who lived incentral Mexico and founded what is now Mexico City,then Tenochtitlan. Words in English with a Náhuatlorigin include avocado, chocolate, and tomato.Pre-Columbian Aztec writing was image-based and didnot represent the full language, but texts (calledcodices) served as a memory aid for people narratinga text. With the Spanish conquest, the Latin scriptwas introduced to represent Náhuatl, and many texts,both prose and poetry, have been preserved since thesixteenth century, relying on the earlier pictorialrepresentations in many cases. One of the featuresof Náhuatl is the possibility of adding the objectof the verb directly to the verb itself, as inni-naka-kwa “I eatmeat” (literally I-flesh-eat). There are someSpanish loans in Náhuatl, such as maske “more than” (<Spanish más que) inthe translation.

Wayuunaiki (also called Wayuu or Guajiro)is the language of the Wayuu; sometimes the languageis also referred to by the name of the group. It is,for Amerindian languages, a surprisingly stronglanguage, with over 300,000 speakers.