About 1000 individual languages. Humans have been in South America for at least 12,500 years. As settlements spread along rivers and coastlines, both intermixture and isolation of South American populations occurred, with millenia of separation eventually resulting from barriers of water, rainforests, and mountains. Such ancient trends, overlain by more recent displacements of colonialism, have caused South America to contain the most diverse body of native languages on any continent. Many are now extinct, and others are mere remnants of what contact period sources such as Carvajal, reporting for the Orellana Amazon expedition in 1542, saw as very large populations. A total of 34 language families and over a dozen isolated stocks with about 1000 individual languages have been identified in South America. This represents a high level of diversity on the level of language family compared to other continental areas. All of Africa, Asia, and Europe combined have only 21 language families, some of which have many more languages than any South American language family. In Africa, for example, a single family (Niger-Congo) contains 1436 languages, while another (Bantu) has over 1000 languages. In Europe and western Asia, meanwhile, the Indo-European family includes 425 languages, ranging from Gaelic to Hindi. Based on evidence of both physical and linguistic types among Native Americans, scientists have postulated at least three major migrations into the New World, beginning over 10,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence from Monte Verde and other sites shows independently that humans have been in South America for at least twelve and a half thousand years. The relative complexity of South American languages is thus partly due to gradual isolation of many groups over long periods of time. Such diversity due to isolation is also observed in New Guinea ,which itself contains over 1000 languages in nine families within a much smaller, but similarly dissected terrain. Yet there have also been serious classification problems in South America stemming from lack of data. Given the absence of both aboriginal writing systems and archaeological findings in many tropical forest regions, reconstructing ancestral language relations from comparisons of present languages provides both a difficult challenge, and a unique opportunity to unravel the prehistory of South America. http://www.athenapub.com/salang1.htm