The Classification of American Languages (Translated from English by Igor V. Kuznetsov)

The readers are invited to familiarize themselves with an article, ‘The Classification of American Languages' (1920, with an extension of 1929), by Franz Boas, who was one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, as well as the “heroic mentor” of the Historical School and American descriptivism, including the field devoted to the study of unwritten languages. By the time Boas's article was published, linguistic anthropologists from North America had made a huge breakthrough in the study and systematization of “exotic” (non-European) languages, and Edward Sapir's famous six phyla appeared. To understand the peculiarities of the methodology that guided these researchers, Boas's position is extremely important. Unfortunately, his works on this topic have never been translated into Russian. The presented publication is intended to fill this gap.

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