When Powell published his exhaustive classification of the aboriginal languages of North America north of Mexico (1891), he set up 58 independent linguistic families. Since he was interested in establishing nomenclature as well as in determining families, he adopted the convention of adding the suffix -an or -ian to each of his proposed names. Even though it is desirable to have a uniform way of designating linguistic families, it turns out that the device has tended to obscure an extremely noteworthy fact about these families, namely that over 40 per cent of them are language isolates, that is, single languages with no demonstrable close relationship to any other single language or family of languages. Moreover, the majority of these language isolates were concentrated in two principal areas: (1) the “Pacific” area along the Pacific Coast from Southern Alaska to Baja California, and (2) the “Gulf” area along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Coahuila. Notwithstanding the fact that many of the language isolates of these two areas have now been subincluded in larger groupings, they remain, for the most part, but distantly related to their nearest congeners. For this reason they still play a significant role in imparting to these two large areas their distinctive character of great linguistic diversity.

This brief survey directs attention to certain problems involved in assigning together linguistic units (grouping) and in showing by such assignment degrees of genetic relationship (subgrouping). It deals with these topics only with regard to relatively large-scale classificatory units in North American Indian languages. It notes research and cites literature, largely from the past decade, in which reference to and citation of earlier work may be found. And it has omitted mention or discussion of certain recent classificatory proposals for which evidence is not adduced or for which existence of a reproducible method is not clear.

The point of this paper is an extremely simple and not at all a surprising one, one that is in no way new. It is essentially the following: the native speakers of any language know its structure and the linguist doing field work can make use of this knowledge in ways other than the obvious one of asking an informant to produce utterances, with little or no other direction. What I hope to do here is outline briefly a set of strategies or field-work techniques developed during the past two years in a field methods course at the University of Illinois. In particular, I will describe certain aspects of our research on Papago done in co-operation with Mr. Albert Alvarez, a Papago speaker, who served as assistant in the course during the academic year 1963-64.

In a recent paper Melville Jacobs outlined briefly the history of linguistic research in connection with indigenous languages of Oregon. In this paper I will not repeat what has already been said, but rather attempt to describe the field situation in Oregon at the present time as accurately and completely as possible.

In May 1963 I began a survey of the indigenous languages still spoken in Oregon and the data presented below were derived from this survey. The purpose of the study was to determine the number of possible informants still using each of the native languages and the level of competence of each speaker in so far as this could be determined without actually doing linguistic field-work at the time. This information was a necessary prerequisite to the organization of a programme of research designed to salvage as much of the remaining languages in the area as possible.

In the latter part of the 1920’s we began to understand more and more the phonological system of the Athapaskan languages, mainly through the efforts of Edward Sapir. It was the belief then that the Proto-Athapaskan phonological system, particularly the consonantal system, can be fairly accurately reconstructed. For many years my friend Harry Hoijer has carried this type of comparative study further by including a number of languages hitherto not available, so that the comparative study of Athapaskan languages has become one of the best explored fields in North America. There are of course many problems which remain to be solved, such as the vocalic system, the vocalic lengths, the development of pitch or the loss of it, and other problems of morphology. It is the purpose of this paper to draw attention to some of these problems, rather than to solve them.

We begin with an unanswerable question: was there more than trivial linguistic extinction before contact periods with Europeans? There is no question about the extinction of many languages after the contact periods. On landing at Plymouth, the Pilgrims, in Paul Radin’s grim view, first fell upon their knees and then upon the necks of the Indians. After King Philip’s War, many of the coastal tribes removed themselves to live with interior Algonquian tribes. There are some Algonquian Indians still living along the New England coast, as at Martha’s Vineyard and Old Town, Maine; but except for a few older Penobscot, all speak English. Some Algonquians found along the middle Atlantic coast withdrew over the Appalachians, and now speak Shawnee and Delaware in Oklahoma. But Iroquois speakers remain in New York State; some have recently settled in Brooklyn, where they specialize in the construction of tall buildings without fear of height; others remain in the Carolinas (Cherokee). And some Muskogean speakers remain in Florida (Seminoles). But most aboriginal languages of the Atlantic coast are extinct, just as most languages of the California coast became extinct, while languages in the valleys and mountains and deserts of California continued to be spoken.

Thirty years ago the leitmotif of ethnology and linguistics was militant relativism. It was emphasized that each culture and each language is a world of its own with its own elements and arrangements, its own standards, and its own laws. It was often, though not always, clearly recognized that, running across the differences, there were points of agreement among different systems. In the effort to avoid ethnocentrically based errors, the principle of generalization itself was sometimes atrophied.

In the matter of research technique, openmindedness was emphasized. The field-worker was urged to gather plentiful evidence before drawing any conclusions. In matters of phonology it was recommended that one write exactly what one heard. Now, one of the positive fruits of the relativist epoch was the development of the idea of structure, the gestalt principle, and, in the study of sounds, phonemics. This means that not until one has discovered the system is he in a position to perceive sounds adequately. And something of the same kind is applicable in other phases of language. In dropping the illusion of objective non-phonemic recording there was opened up a short-cut to the laborious collection of unorganized facts.

Serious anthropological work on the Northwest Coast of North America began with Boas in 1886, and through Boas’s influence a knowledge of the Northwest Coast became a part of the professional equipment of the whole generation of anthropologists that followed him. Native cultures of the Northwest Coast became famous for their colour and drama and provided wonderful material for the refuting of easy generalizations about “primitive” peoples, about their mythology, art, social organization, and economy. Northwest Coast examples continue to appear in the most recent textbooks.

This paper is an informal summary preview of Eyak structure, with a minimum of exemplification and a maximum of structural tables and diagrams. Included are a number of historical and comparative remarks with reference to Athapaskan and Tlingit. There are still three persons capable of serving adequately as informants for Eyak. The following is a summary report of the results of field-work with these persons, up to July 10, 1964, on a grant from the National Science Foundation. The phonology of Eyak is now well understood, as is, more surprisingly, the verb. In addition, the list of morphemes is approaching exhaustiveness. The consonant inventory is shown in Table I: