According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, it is generally believed that there were over 1 million speakers of more than 2,000 indigenous languages spoken in the Western Hemisphere around the time of the arrival of Christopher Columbus. America accounts for 300 of these languages, yet today only 175 remain and it is estimated that just 20 will exist in 2050.
Greg Anderson, director of Living Tongues, told National Geographic that, although there were 14 different language families in Oregon around 200 years ago, only five existed in 2009. Those that are still spoken today are generally spoken by just a small number of people.
200 years ago, Oregon had more language families than all of Europe combined.
By the 1950s, it is thought that around 66% of all Native American languages were either facing extinction or had already died out. As many as half of the Native American languages once spoken north of Mexico are now extinct, while the other half are spoken by less than 1,000 people.
A factor that proved to be a threat to Native American language and culture was the European settlement. When the Europeans first began to colonise the Americas, they brought with them infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles, along with a settlement strategy of fighting and killing Native Americans for their land.
The Europeans used the diseases and their immunity as an advantage in their fight against the Native Americans. Some settlers purposefully gave blankets from quarantined areas or from those which once belonged to infected patients to the Native Americans to spread the diseases they had brought with them.
Disease accounted for the deaths of between 75-90% of all Indian deaths.