Thousands of languages, classified in dozens of language families, were spoken throughout the Americas prior to the arrival of the Europeans. These languages covered a geographical area stretching from Alaska to Greenland and from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. The most widely spoken language group stemmed from the Quechua family and includes Aymara, Guarani, and Nahuatl. Several pre-Columbian civilization such as the Maya, Olmec, and Zapotec had also developed writing systems; Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, and China are three places where writing developed independently. The number of languages and the vast differences between the languages spoken throughout the Americas suggests several waves of migration had occurred over a long period time. This explains the wide distribution of the many unrelated languages spoken in the Americas.
