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| Handbook of American Indian Languages | |
|---|---|
| Title | Handbook of American Indian Languages |
| Author | Franz Boas |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Indigenous languages of the Americas |
| Publisher | Bureau of American Ethnology |
| Pub date | 1911–1917 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | Various |
Handbook of American Indian Languages is a multi-part compilation and analytical work initiated by Franz Boas and published through the Bureau of American Ethnology that surveys multiple Indigenous languages across North, Central, and South America. It emerged amid early twentieth-century ethnographic and linguistic efforts tied to institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, the American Anthropological Association, and the American Philosophical Society. The Handbook intersects with contemporaneous projects at the University of Berlin, Columbia University, University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the American Museum of Natural History.
Boas began planning the Handbook after fieldwork among the Kwakwaka'wakw, Inuit, Tsimshian, and Iroquois Confederacy communities and during collaborations with colleagues including Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and Leonard Bloomfield. The project was supported by figures and entities such as J. Walter Fewkes, John Wesley Powell, William Henry Holmes, George Brown Goode, and funding from the Carnegie Institution and the National Academy of Sciences. The first fascicles were issued by the Bureau of American Ethnology in serial form; subsequent volumes involved editors and contributors associated with Columbia University Press, the University of Chicago Press, and the International Congress of Americanists. The publication spanned years marked by events including the Paleo-Indian research surge, the aftermath of the Spanish–American War, and the expansion of academic networks like the American Folklore Society.
The Handbook comprises descriptive grammars, word lists, text collections, and comparative materials gathered from fieldworkers such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Harry Hoijer, Raymond F. Hodge, and John P. Harrington. Sections were organized geographically and typologically to cover families and isolates like Algonquian languages, Iroquoian languages, Siouan languages, Uto-Aztecan languages, Mayan languages, Quechuan languages, Arawakan languages, Tupian languages, Cariban languages, Chibchan languages, Eskimo–Aleut languages, Na-Dene languages, Salishan languages, Wakashan languages, Athabaskan languages, Caddoan languages, Hokan languages, Yuman languages, Muskogean languages, Tucanoan languages, and numerous isolates such as Zuni language, Haida language, Chimakuan languages, and Beothuk language. The volumes include phonetic transcriptions using systems antecedent to the International Phonetic Association conventions and employed orthographies similar to those later used by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch scholars and contemporaries at the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Boas and contributors applied field methods shaped by precedents from Wilhelm von Humboldt influences, the descriptive agenda of August Schleicher contrasts, and the comparative impulses seen in the work of Sir William Jones and S. R. Driver. The Handbook emphasizes primary data gathering—elicitation, narrative texts, genealogical vocabularies—conducted in contexts that involved collaboration with speakers from communities like the Cherokee Nation, Navajo Nation, Lakota Sioux, Maya peoples, Guarani people, Mapuche, Zapotec people, Mixtec people, and Nahua people. Analytical approaches anticipated later frameworks in structural linguistics introduced by scholars such as Leonard Bloomfield and Edward Sapir, while also informing typological questions later pursued at venues like the Linguistic Society of America and the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Contemporaries in anthropology and linguistics, including Bronisław Malinowski, James Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner, engaged with the Handbook’s data for comparative and theoretical work. Critics and supporters debated Boas’s positions relative to the diffusionist arguments of figures like Grafton Elliot Smith and the evolutionary models of Lewis Henry Morgan. The Handbook significantly influenced later scholars—Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Greenberg, Kenneth L. Hale, William Bright, Martha J. Brett, and Michael Silverstein—and shaped institutional curricula at Yale University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan, Indiana University Bloomington, and University of Washington. Its datasets informed comparative databases at centers such as the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the School for Advanced Research, and the American Philosophical Society Library.
Posthumous editions, reprints, and annotated versions were issued by presses including University of California Press, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and small academic publishers affiliated with University of New Mexico Press and University of Nebraska Press. Translations and excerpted selections appeared in languages used by scholars at the Université de Paris, Goethe University Frankfurt, Università di Roma, Universität Zürich, and Japanese academic circles at University of Tokyo. Supplements and fieldnotes integrating later work from researchers such as Kenneth Pike, Mary Haas, Tsunoda Tasaku, Isidore Dyen, and Lyle Campbell have been archived at repositories like the Library of Congress, the Bancroft Library, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Although produced in an era of assimilationist policies exemplified by legislation contemporaneous with the Handbook’s publication, the descriptive resources provided by Boas and contributors have been used by Indigenous communities—including organizations like the Navajo Nation Department of Diné Education, the United Houma Nation, Haida Nation initiatives, Māori Language Commission-inspired analogues, and the First Nations Language Centre—for documentation, curriculum development, and orthography planning. Later activists and linguists such as Marilyn Silverman, Leanne Hinton, Hector Flores, Diane Archibald, and Ken Hale drew on archival materials from the Handbook in projects associated with institutions like the National Museum of the American Indian, First Peoples' Cultural Council, Truth and Reconciliation Commission-linked programs, and university-based language centers at University of Alaska Fairbanks and Simon Fraser University.
Category:Linguistics books Category:Franz Boas Category:Indigenous languages of the Americas