Classification of American Indian Languages

Classification of American Indian languages Franz Boas‡ 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. In a paper published in 19201 I discussed the problem of the interrelation of American Indian languages. I pointed out that morphological types are distributed over large areas and that in these morphological groups differences representing the character of the vocabulary occur which make it difficult to assume that the languages, as now spoken, are derived from the same 'Ursprache'. I pointed out that in the small linguistic units of early times, the conditions of mixture were quite different from those found in languages spoken over large areas and by many individuals. A further consideration of the problem led to the conclusion that an answer to the fundamental question must be sought through an investigation of mutual influences and the extent to which they may modify languages; particularly, in how far one linguistic type may influence the morphology of another. I believe everybody will agree that words may be borrowed and may modify the vocabulary of a language; perhaps also that the phonetic character of one language may influence that of its neighbors. I have given a few general instances in the paper mentioned before, and today I will add one example that seems to be particularly instructive. The Nez Percé, an eastern Sahaptin language, has rigid rules of vocalic harmony according to which vowels may be divided into two classes: a and o as one group; all the others as a second group. In the system of consonants occurs an s with raised margin of the tongue and the dental t series. Another characteristic sound is a voiced affricative, something like dl. During the 18th century a large group of the Sahaptin penetrated into the State of Washington and some of them crossed the Cascade Mountains where they intermarried with the Salishan tribes resident there. The phonetic elements of the present dialect of this region are practically identical with those of the neighboring Salish tribes. The vocalic system is the same. There is no trace of vocalic harmony. We recognize that a comparison of vocabularies of languages, the history of which is unknown, offers serious difficulties, and that the changes brought about by the shifting of sounds, by semantic modification, and by new formations, may be so numerous that identification becomes possible in exceptional cases only. Languages behave differently in these respects. Some, like the Eskimo, are so conservative that even now the differentiation between Alaskan and Greenland dialects is slight, although the two groups have been separated for more than a thousand years. The more striking is the divergence of the vocabulary of the related Aleutian. Nahuatl of Mexico has changed End Page 167 in so far as the higher literary style has disappeared and as old ideas have vanished and new ones have been introduced with concomitant change of vocabulary. The syntactic subordination and coördination of phrases have yielded to Spanish types. In all other respects the modern language has not changed. It seems even possible to recognize the dialectic differences of various areas which may be reconstructed from the grammars of the early 16th century. On the other hand, the Salishan languages of British Columbia and Washington illustrate a great instability in morphology and lexicography. We can only guess what the causes of the difference in behavior of different languages may be. The often-expressed opinion that 'primitive languages' undergo very rapid changes is true to a very limited extent only. There is no doubt that in many cases languages sprung from the same source and changing by internal forces only may have become so different that without historical data their relation cannot be established. Nevertheless the question remains whether hybridization of languages, not only in phonetics and vocabulary, but also in morphology, may have occurred. So far as I know the actual process of a transfer of grammatical categories from one language to another has never been...