How did colonial linguistic exchanges between Amerindians and Europeans shape early modern conceptualizations of language itself--its locus and limits, its ideological plasticity or inflexibility? While oral traditions are persistent objects of scholarly attention, the concept of orality in itself has often been taken for granted, receiving less theoretical examination in comparison to the extensive scholarly corpus devoted to interrogating categories such as writing, literacy, text, and media. My research addresses the pending question of the complexities of orality in the New World by arguing that colonial encounters produced multiple oralities: a series of semiotic, aesthetic, and material phenomena that often emerge through the gestures of suckling and singing, in the regimes of grammar and taste, and in the performance of combat and proselytization. This study addresses early modern linguistic and cultural encounters in the Americas, focusing on the role of Amerindian languages in the development of what I call a New World poetics. I adopt an inter-American and transatlantic framework in order to compare how multilingual actors narrated and reinvented indigenous languages in historical, linguistic, lyric, and missionary works. The corpus under consideration includes the Nahuatl-language poetry collected in the Cantares Mexicanos manuscript, the Tupi grammar authored by Jesuit Jose de Anchieta, linguistic and missionary tracts and translations by Roger Williams and John Eliot, and the treatise on Incan history and customs by El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. I demonstrate that these texts, written in and concerning languages such as Nahuatl, Narragansett, Quechua, Tupi, and Wampanoag, all evince sustained attention to the complexities of orality, conceived through the somatic and material qualities of speech, song, and alphabetic writing. Addressing these distinct forms of orality in colonial American literatures provides a vocabulary and framework for thinking about the oral in plural terms, related but not restricted to its relationship with written and spoken expression. In navigating the intersections of major Amerindian and European languages and traditions within a unified theoretical framework, my project integrates both comparative American and transatlantic encounters as the coordinates within which to critically revise traditional notions of orality used to interrogate the early colonial world. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]