One of the most ambitious—and controversial—attempts to answer this question is the “three-wave” migration theory, famously championed by linguist Joseph Greenberg. It proposes a deceptively simple narrative to explain the peopling of an entire continent, using language as its primary evidence. While the theory is now largely rejected by specialists, it remains a fascinating chapter in the story of historical linguistics and a powerful illustration of the search for deep connections in human history.
In his 1987 book Language in the Americas, Greenberg argued that nearly all Indigenous languages of the Americas could be classified into just three massive families, each corresponding to a distinct wave of migration from Asia across the Bering land bridge.
How did Greenberg arrive at such a sweeping conclusion? He used a method called “multilateral comparison”, or “mass lexical comparison”. Instead of the painstaking, slow work of the traditional comparative method—which reconstructs ancestral “proto-languages” by identifying regular sound correspondences between two or three languages at a time—Greenberg looked for broad similarities across hundreds of languages simultaneously.
He focused on core vocabulary (like pronouns, body parts, and simple verbs) and grammatical elements. If he saw a pattern emerge across a wide geographic area, he considered it evidence of a distant genetic relationship.
For example, one of his key pieces of evidence for the Amerind family was the widespread pattern of first-person pronouns (“I”) using an n- sound and second-person pronouns (“you”) using an m- sound. He pointed to words like no (“I”) in Wappo (California) and ma (“you”) in a Cariban language of South America as evidence of a shared heritage, despite the immense distance separating them.
While Greenberg’s proposal was bold and initially seemed to align with some early genetic studies, it was met with immediate and forceful criticism from the majority of historical linguists. The objections primarily center on his methodology.
Interestingly, subsequent research has lent more credence to a deep connection for the Na-Dené family. The Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis, which proposes a link between the Na-Dené languages of North America and the Ket language of Siberia, is based on rigorous comparisons of morphology and sound systems and has gained significant acceptance. This stands in stark contrast to the Amerind proposal, which remains on the fringe.
So where does this leave us? The three-wave theory, for all its flaws, was a thought-provoking attempt to paint a big picture of American prehistory. It forced linguists to confront the challenges of deep time classification and sparked decades of debate and new research.
Today, the consensus is that the pre-Columbian Americas were not a neat triptych of three language families. They were, and remain, a rich, complex, and ancient tapestry woven from countless distinct linguistic threads. Most linguists currently recognize at least 150-200 separate language families and isolates (languages with no known relatives) in the Americas. The work of understanding their histories is a slow, careful process—one that involves reconstructing smaller, more plausible families like Uto-Aztecan or Mayan, rather than making grand, sweeping claims.
While Greenberg’s simple map has been put aside, the true linguistic map of the Americas is far more intricate and, ultimately, more fascinating. It speaks to millennia of human migration, innovation, and interaction—a story that is still being carefully pieced together, one language at a time.
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