The Short Answer
There isn't just one language. Before European contact, Indigenous peoples across North America spoke somewhere between 300 and 500 distinct languages. Many are extinct now. The ones still spoken today range from Navajo, which has around 170,000 speakers, to Eyak, which went silent with its last fluent speaker in 2008. I ran into this exact question while helping a friend track down resources for her daughter's school project. She assumed there was one "Native American language." When I told her there were over a hundred still in active use across the continent alone, she was genuinely confused. That's pretty normal. Most people grow up thinking it's a single language or that they all just speak English. The reality is messier. Languages like Cherokee, Lakota, and Inuktitut are each their own complete linguistic systems. They don't share much vocabulary or grammar with each other, even when the communities live hundreds of miles apart. Some belong to large language families. Na-Dené covers Navajo and several Alaskan languages. Uto-Aztecan stretches from Utah down through Mexico. Algic includes Ojibwe and a few others. Then there are isolates—languages with no known relatives at all, like Basque in Europe, or Haida and Tlingit in the Pacific Northwest.
English is what most Indigenous people speak today as a first or only language, simply because colonization disrupted language transmission for centuries. But that doesn't mean the original languages disappeared entirely. Several communities have been running immersion programs for the past couple decades, and the results are real. Words that hadn't been spoken in a generation are coming back into daily conversation in places like Hawaii with Ōlelo Hawaii, or among the Oneida in Wisconsin. One thing people consistently get wrong is assuming similarity between languages just because the speakers are neighboring tribes. I spent a fair amount of time in Arizona working with a group trying to document oral histories, and we kept running into translation problems because we'd assumed Apache dialects and Navajo were close enough to. They aren't. The grammatical structures are fundamentally different even where some word roots overlap from centuries of trade contact. That's a pitfall you see repeated in linguistic fieldwork all the time. Don't guess relationships between languages. Check the actual phylogenetic classifications. Another thing worth noting: the number of languages still actively spoken is small compared to what existed historically. Estimates vary, but roughly a third of the pre-contact languages in what is now the United States and Canada have no fluent native speakers left. The rest are spoken by aging populations in many cases, though that's changing slowly in certain areas where revitalization efforts have gained traction. Cherokee has the most robust program I've seen, partly because the script—the syllabary invented by Sequoyah—gives it a written foundation that makes teaching materials easier to produce.
If you're looking for practical resources, the Endangered Languages Project at endangeredlanguages.com is one of the better aggregators. Each language gets a page with speaker numbers, location data, and links to relevant organizations. For classroom or self-study purposes, tribal university websites tend to have the most reliable materials. University programs sometimes publish textbooks, but they're often written from an academic linguistics angle that assumes you already know what a verb stem is. Tribal college materials tend to be more accessible if your goal is actual conversation rather than analysis. There's no single download or app that covers this territory in any meaningful way. You'd need to target specific languages individually. Navajo has the most available content—apps, YouTube channels, even a mobile dictionary. Anything beyond the major twenty or so languages gets sparse fast. That's not a reflection of importance. It's a reflection of funding and speaker population.
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