César Itier nous rappelle où se situent les langues amérindiennes dans la classification générale des langues. César Itier specifies Amerindian languages’ place in the broader classification of world languages. A few years ago, American linguist Joseph Grinberg proposed grouping most indigenous Amerindian languages in an “Amerindian family,” but the idea was rejected by the academic community. South America is currently the continent which has the largest number of language families. Generally speaking, Quechua does not belong to any language family. In fact, with its many dialectical varieties, it is a language family in and of itself. In the 1970s, one researcher proposed regrouping Quechua with Aymara into a new family called Quechumara. But, despite certain similarities between the two languages, namely their phonological and morphological structures, the lexical differences in vocabulary were too great to group both languages into a single family.