Nineteenth-century ethnology treated shared language as proof of shared biology

Evidence

One of the strong claims in nineteenthand early twentieth-century racial science was that boundaries of linguistic difference correlated with physical anthropology. The then-new European science of ethnology was built on a related theory that linguistic similarity was evidence of common heritage and, therefore, of biological similarity. Based on this, ethnologists organized humankind into groups and hierarchically ranked them as more or less morally, culturally, and intellectually developed. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 199

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how ethnology’s founding premise conflated linguistic similarity with biological kinship — a key conceptual framework for the whole chapter.
• XREF: Ties to the Saussurean and Boasian critiques of equating language with race in this reader’s linguistics-heavy archive. — connects to: the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”

Related

• Nineteenth-century ethnology subsumed caste into biologically determined race essences (similarity 0.80)
• Linguistic distinctions were extended to claim ontological differences between peoples (similarity 0.79)
• Linguistic difference was mapped directly onto presumed racial difference. (similarity 0.79)