Franz Boas’ ‘purely analytical approach’ to language classification in the backdrop to American structuralism

Abstract

Abstract In this essay, Franz Boas (1858–1942) summarizes his position on how to classify Native American languages. For linguists, the issue gave them a chance to promote the integrity of Native American languages, by demonstrating that techniques of analysis developed in the study of Indo-European languages could be applied to Chinook or Algonquian. For ethnologists, classification was essential in sorting out historical relationships among multiple tribes. These data were of practical value to the US government as it struggled to assert its hegemony over the many indigenous groups that inhabited the land now claimed by European immigrants. The essay illustrates many facets of Boas’ linguistics: the high value he placed on inspection of connected texts; his facility with multiple Native American languages; his conservatism in establishing genetic relationships. The text also displays some of the limits of Boas’ philological training, and his reluctance to generalize in favor of treating every language as a unique case. Moreover, this essay illustrates how Boas, without fully realizing the features of a structuralist approach, prepared the way for American structuralism by rejecting classification of languages into a priori categories such as ‘isolating’ versus ‘agglutinative’. Instead, Boas promoted what he called a ‘purely analytical’ approach, which described languages as individual phenomena from the (synchronic) point of view of a native speaker with no knowledge of any other language. Importantly, Boas’ emphasis on the individuality of languages stopped short of understanding them as systems of elements balanced internally against each other wherein everything hangs together.