On classification, language, and American Indian scholarship: Commentary on Boas 1929

On classification, language, and American Indian scholarship:Commentary on Boas 1929 Barbra A. Meek So far as I know the actual process of a transfer of grammatical categories from one language to another or hybridization has never been observed, although minor changes, like the adoption of a form here and there, and syntactic influences are known to occur. … The question in which we are interested is not that of the theoretical definition of relation of languages as defined by Meillet …, but merely a question of historical development. (Franz Boas 1929:2, 71) Reflecting on the intersection of the fields of American Indian languages and linguistic anthropology through Franz Boas's brief 1929 commentary on one of the conundrums of language classification, a conundrum captured by his phrase 'hybridization',2 I am reminded of many of the challenges underscoring the relationship between the field of linguistics and Indigenous communities. Grounded in a history of colonization, Boas's piece, 'Classification of American Indian languages', neither directly names colonizing projects of forced removal nor calls out the active efforts of assimilation into and through English. In this piece, Boas remained first and foremost interested in the structural elements of languages and in the curiously similar grammatical patterns and phonological processes (presence and absence of vocalic harmony, for example) found across unrelated, though geographically contiguous, languages. While his conclusion resonates with contemporary Indigenous language research—'we have to recognize that many of the languages have multiple roots' (p. 7)—his articulation of the problem, that is, accounting for grammatical similarities across unrelated languages, suggests an approach that requires attention to both Indigenous narrative and discourse, but pointedly does not elaborate upon this in the overarching concern with 'roots' (or origins). That is, the concern remains rooted in discerning 'firstness' (as in first peoples and first colonies) and presupposing 'lastness' (as in last American Indians;3 Davis 2016, O'Brien 2010). Boas's piece also underscores the perpetual challenge faced by American Indian communities and field researchers who work from the ground up or, perhaps more aptly, from within the thick of things. Boas offers an analysis of American Indian languages that many current scholars embrace: the possibility that many of the structures of language that are difficult to categorize result from contact and language mixing. However, the field he founded at the time—and the majority of linguists who would follow—largely focused on how to categorize linguistic forms and the histories of (genetic) relatedness End Page 172 among the languages they identified. They deferred tackling the thornier issue emerging at the time: how do new linguistic forms arise and new grammatical structures emerge on the ground, that is, in and through interaction? To tackle some of these thornier issues, I offer some themes for reflection. However, the following comments do not arise directly from Boas's article, but rather from larger issues raised by his article and by the conceptual framework in which it is written. The first overarching theme is about how to approach change over time, whether our object of analysis is an immediate, synchronic conversation or an age-graded trajectory of verb development in a contact situation. Both objects involve a consideration of context and an attention to practice, which raises the following question: what if we consider unique invention, marriage, multilingualism, cultural contact, and trade relations as the rule rather than the exception in studies of language change, and conversation, educational routines, and narrative as central components of child language development and, by extension, language loss? The second theme considers the ideological dimensions of our analytic gaze (how we talk about language) and accompanying methods (elicitation and description). Linguistics remains somewhat circumspect about language as a dynamic, interactional process, as verb-ing or language-ing (Alim 2016). And yet the First Nations language experts with whom I have worked took this dynamic view for granted. This second theme suggests the possibility that the linguistic categories assumed by Boas may not be the appropriate ones for investigating American Indian languages and that they may not align with Indigenous communities' ideas about language (or their language ideologies). Such misalignments point to the thorny issue of colonization and salvage linguistics. The...