As is well known, the American continent constitutes one of the regions of the world with the greatest linguistic wealth. Although estimates differ, conservative reconstructions propose the existence, in South America alone, of up to a thousand languages belonging to no fewer than 110 linguistic lineages (Kaufman 1990), of which 40% are represented by a single language (Seifart and Hammarström 2017). In North America, California alone had no fewer than 78 languages (Golla 2011), many belonging to small, local families; the rest of the continent significantly increases the number of languages and families. As in the rest of the world, this diversity is not distributed homogeneously: broad zones of high diversity are observed, such as Amazonia or California, in contrast to others where it is lower.
At the same time, these distributions are not static, and maps such as those of Haynie and Gavin (2019) or Kaufman (2007) represent a generic “point of contact” situation that perhaps never existed. This is because that point can differ by hundreds of years, so such maps run the risk of indirectly portraying indigenous peoples as if they had no history prior to European colonization (Wolf 1982). European impact has often drastically changed the distribution of indigenous languages and continues to do so across the American continent as a whole. On one hand, state-backed settler colonialism frequently displaced indigenous peoples from the most economically attractive lands, drastically impacting demographic and linguistic structure. On the other, for some groups, European impact opened new opportunities to expand beyond their traditional lands (e.g., Rhodes 2020). Although nearly ubiquitous, these changes in the reach of languages have rarely been investigated in detail, despite their importance for understanding the complex linguistic history of the American continent and for studying patterns and asymmetries in linguistic diversity at the continental scale (e.g., Pacheco Coelho et al. 2019) or global scale (Nettle 1999, Hua et al. 2019).
In this workshop, our aim is to trace these developments at the local, regional or continental level. We welcome contributions presenting case studies on how the distribution of a language or language family changed. This can be based on different lines of evidence, whether historical-linguistic, ethnographic, based on historical documents, or toponymic analysis — often conservative and preservative of earlier stages of linguistic distributions (Urban 2023) — and, where applicable, archaeological evidence. We also welcome broader-scope contributions attempting to reconstruct the ancient linguistic landscape of a region at a given moment, such as Urban (2019) for the northern coast of Peru. In both cases, the aim is to obtain material to improve the historical cartography of the continent’s linguistic diversity. In line with the congress’s central theme, we also accept papers on how the link between language and territory continues to be represented in cultural memory, a recurring phenomenon in both North America (e.g., Basso 1996) and South America (e.g., Santos-Granero 1998).
