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Classification of American Indian Languages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
Extract
The author points out cases in which contiguous languages, though different in structure and vocabulary, exhibit in common striking morphologic peculiarities that must have spread by borrowing from language to language. A simple genealogical classification cannot therefore adequately represent the development, but ‘hybridization’ must also be taken into account.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 2024 Linguistic Society of America
Footnotes
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[Editorial note: This article was originally published in Language 5(1).1–7, 1929. In celebration of the Centennial of the Linguistic Society of America and of this journal, we are reprinting one or two articles per each decade of Language, selected for their quality and importance to the field. Each article is accompanied by a new piece by colleagues who have expertise and unique insights on the reprinted articles, to offer commentary from both historical and modern perspectives.]
References
1 [‘The classification of American languages’, by Franz Boas.] American Anthropologist 22.367–76. [DOI: 10.1525/aa.1920.22.4.02a00070.]
2 [‘Coos’, by Leo J. Frachtenberg. Handbook of American Indian languages, vol. 2, ed. by Franz Boas, 319–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139626569.015], p. 383.
3 [Editorial note: The original publication referenced ‘Meillet and Ween’ here, but the editors were unable to identify any scholar by the name of Ween. A subsequent 1940 reprint of this article edited by the author himself omitted this reference (see p. 225 in Race, language and culture, by Franz Boas. New York: MacMillan, 1940), suggesting that ‘and Ween’ was a typographical error. We follow the reprint here.]