Native Americans Fear Loss Of Indigenous Languages In US

As Native Americans this week celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day -- the holiday increasingly recognized in the United States in lieu of "Columbus Day" -- members of the continent's hundreds of tribes shared a common concern: the ongoing extinction of their ancestral languages.

The United States is currently home to 6.8 million Native Americans, or two percent of the population.

Members of the Shinnecock Nation on Long Island gathered for the sunrise to honor this week's holiday, which has been adopted by more than a dozen US states and cities amid the growing view that Italian explorer Christopher Columbus brought little more than genocide and colonization to the Americas in 1492.

And further north on the Atlantic Coast, people of the Americas and Caribbean ate together as they held discussions, danced and sang.

But while their ancestors saw their communities decimated by centuries of colonization, descendants today fear their culture and languages could be swallowed up in a single generation by English and Spanish.