South American families

South America holds the bulk of the hemisphere's linguistic diversity, over 100 families and isolates. Tupían's homeland is almost certainly southwestern Amazonia around Rondônia, ~5,000 years ago, where branch diversity is highest, and Tupi-Guaraní is one late, fast-spreading branch within it: Guaraní into Paraguay and the Paraná basin, Tupinambá up the Brazilian coast where the Portuguese met it. Chibchan sits in the Isthmo-Colombian area across Costa Rica, Panama and northern Colombia, with the Muisca of the Bogotá savanna as the highland branch and the Kogi and Arhuaco in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta as the surviving northern ones.

Arawakan has the widest footprint of any family in the hemisphere, and beyond these there are Cariban, Macro-Jê, Panoan and Tucanoan in Amazonia, Quechuan and Aymaran in the Andes (treated as unrelated despite enormous contact vocabulary), and isolates like Mapudungun, Warao and Yanomaman. The pattern: coastal and lowland families look shallow and wide because they expanded recently and fast, while the deep tangled diversity sits in western Amazonia and along the Andean flank.