Moving from Racism to Relativism: Paradigm Shift in the Accounts of the North American Indian Languages

The history of the accounts of North American Indian languages and of the references to these accounts remains closely interrelated with the history of western modernisation and colonisation. The “exotic” otherness of those languages has been valued positively, as in cultural relativism, as well as negatively, as in the preceding racist doctrines. Nevertheless, all such references were typically made by commentators who typically lacked even a basic knowledge of the languages, as a result of which the evolving interpretations reflect the evolution of the main forms of prejudice and the standards of academic thinking over the past four centuries. We examine the accounts of selected linguistic properties of three families of North American Indian languages, i.e., Algonquian, Iroquoian and Eskimo, as well as the references to these accounts in the humanities and social sciences. By illustrating the range of historically variable interpretations of linguistic data, we demonstrate the ambivalence of the methodological status of sources in interdisciplinary discursive contexts as well as the entanglement of linguistic references in the historically variable ideological and theoretical paradigms. In particular, we focus on the central motifs in the analysis of languages that are “exotic” from the point of view of typical properties of Indo-European languages, in the context of discussions regarding the correlations between linguistic structure and cognitive competence, culture as well as the construction of social reality. The analysis will cover accounts of languages and references to these accounts in academic research contexts throughout the last four centuries, and consequently they will be accounted for in terms of the historically changing conceptual and theoretical frames of reference.