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Amerind is one of the three main families in Joseph Greenberg's controversial classification of all Native American languages, obtained by his mass lexical comparison method — the other two being the widely accepted Na-Dené and Eskimo-Aleut families. These three groupings represent three distinct waves of migration in Greenberg's theory, with all American languages outside the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut family being part of Amerind. His classification was laid out in a controversial book published in 1987, Language in the Americas.

Greenberg's proposal is generally rejected by historical linguists for two reasons:

• The method by which he claims to have demonstrated the relationship, mass lexical comparison, is known to be unsound in that it cannot distinguish chance resemblances from those due to a historical relationship among the languages and in that it provides no means of distinguishing resemblances due to common descent from those due to language contact.
• The data on which his claim is based contains an excessively large number of errors. Those who have reviewed his data for languages in which they have expertise typically estimate that fifty percent of the data is in error. In some cases, 100% of his data is erroneous.

A further problem is that he used many old and obscure sources but in violation of normal scholarly standards did not provide citations for the data that he used, making it extremely difficult to check.

The term is also occasionally used to refer (broadly) to the various indigenous languages of the Americas. Some linguists use Amerindian in this sense so as to avoid confusion with Greenberg's proposed language family.

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