regarded as a kind of truism. But when we look carefully into the case, it is not clear that every kind of correlation is absent.[1] Our attention, so far, has been fixed upon the conventional stock grouping, but it is now becoming clear that this is not the only possible classification. Under the appropriate heading, we have noted that in California, positive similarities between a large number of stocks have been worked out and new groupings proposed. Further, we have shown how the great variety of languages spoken in the California culture area fell into groups strictly parallel to the culture grouping, and noted suggestive data from other areas pointing in the same direction. In all this, there appears a definite tendency for language to correlate in certain ways with the culture grouping. Yet, this correlation may be an expression of tribal contact rather than genetic relationship in speech, for it certainly does not follow that similarities in culture parallel identities of linguistic stock.
Perhaps the reader should be reminded that we are discussing unity in stock and not identity of speech. Though the English and German languages are of the same stock, they are far from being mutually intelligible, and this well illustrates what we meet with in native American stocks. It is, in fact, a safe assumption that real identity of speech in the New World will be accompanied by political and cultural unity. On the other hand, we are dealing with a distinction of another sort, for a stock relation is an expression of common origin. Even the most cursory comparison of culture and linguistic maps will show that a single stock may spread into several culture areas, as, for example, the Athapascan, which is found in Areas 1, 2, 3, 6, and 9. This simply means that a language can travel independently of culture, or, at least, outlives it. The point we made in the preceding is that the representatives of different stocks gathered into a culture area often show intra-stock similarities by which also they can be grouped and segregated. These similarities suggest that languages have a grouping similar to, and largely coincident with, the culture grouping. This may, or may not, be the result of genetic
- ↑ Sapir, 1916. I.
