Sapir’s Thesis: Six Basic Indian Languages

After the numerous smaller language groups outlined by John Powell in 1891, later theories moved towards broader categorizations. Edward Sapir’s theory on the existence of six super-stocks, which was released in its most notable form in Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1929, made a number of amalgamations of Native American language stocks that had previously been considered separate. Along with a number of other linguists researching Native American languages at the time, Sapir favoured a ‘lumping’ or reductionist approach to classification. This commonly uses lexical comparisons to assume relationships between languages, as opposed to a splitting approach, which favours hard evidence of a common ancestor language to admit multiple languages to the same stock. Sapir himself considered his own theory of the six super-stocks to be more of a suggestive hypothesis than one based on rigorous proven evidence. Nevertheless, Sapir’s theory was considered to be remarkably accurate and has remained influential in later theories.