Major changes in the study of Amerindian languages came about as a result of the influence of Franz Boas, who was largely responsible for giving such work a more systematic and less anecdotal scientific basis.  Out of this research was to grow a new and quite distinctively American approach to the study of language in general.  ‘Papa Franz’, as he was referred to by some of his students, is generally regarded as the father the authentically scientific study of language in North America, and this is undoubtedly an accurate picture; but in fact his influence on the development of the field was rather more complex than is usually assumed.

  Boas was born in Germany in 1858, and studied natural sciences there.  As a student, he was primarily interested in physics and geography and his training was in those areas rather than in linguistics or anthropology.  In connection with geographic studies, though, he became interested in the possibility of an influence of climate on language, and it was this proposition in part that he was examining when he first did fieldwork with the Eskimo people in 1883, as part of the work of the Jessup expedition.  Over the following years he became familiar with a number of other peoples of the northwest coast of North America through his participation in various expeditions sponsored by German and British scientific societies. 

   Boas took up linguistic work originally as a necessary tool for the investigation of culture, language being a particularly revealing aspect of culture.  Language for him provided a “window on the mind”, whose special virtue is the largely unconscious character of the knowledge it represents.  The Handbook of American Indian Languages written by Boas marks a major turning point in the study of linguistics in America.  Originally conceived as series of sketches which would replace Powell’s earlier survey with a presentation of Amerindian language structures in greater depth, the work came to have much wider significance than this.

  Boas’s point was that each language should be studied in its own terms rather than examined only through the optic of some other system; this seems so obvious today as hardly to be a possible source of major revolution, but it suffices to read a few eighteenth- and nineteenth-century descriptions of North American languages to convince oneself of the major change it represented.  Boas’s insistence on approaching each language in terms of its individual features would become the basis for the characteristic position of later American structuralism “that languages could differ form each other without limit and in unpredictable ways”.

  When we seek to understand Boas’s own picture of sound structure, it is necessary to rely on indirect evidence to supplement his limited explicit treatments of the subject.  The discussions of phonetics in the Introduction to The Handbook of American Indian Languages and in individual descriptive studies of particular languages are not really concerned with developing a general theory of such structure; what they week to establish is an adequate and consistent practice.  Given Boas’s central interest in ethnography rather than in the study of language per se, it is natural that morphology and syntax occupied much more of his attention.

         REFERENCE--

ANDERSON, STEPHEN R. 1985. PHONOLOGY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.