With its “emic” underpinnings and multi-faceted comparative principles, Humboldt’s Americanist platform proved suitable for the initial description and analysis of the languages of the Pacific such as Old Javanese and other Malayo-Polynesian languages in their own terms (“inner forms”) in contrast to the unidimensional Sanskrit-derived models by Indo-Europeanists. Humboldt instead concentrated on linguistic-sociohistorical diversity as key notions in the description and analysis of Southeast Asian and Pacific languages, alternative models of language change, including language contact, and complementary historical methodological resources. He did not suggest any common ancestry between the languages of the Americas and the Pacific beyond that of modern humanity; but he merely argued for linguistic processes that applied in the Americas also to hold true in the Pacific or in still other areas, and thus defined a modern anthropologically-based historical linguistics in truly comparative terms with special attention to the analysis of grammar.

Understanding Alexander von Humboldt’s role in his brother’s Americanist linguistics requires an appreciation of his American explorations. In today’s eastern Venezuela, Alexander engaged in linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork with the Chaima or Kumaná (Cariban); later, he met Quechua-speaking people in the Andes and Nahuas in Mexico among other Indigenous Americans, providing valuable sociolinguistic insights for Wilhelm. Alexander’s map of explorations closely reflects Wilhelm’s early inventory of American grammars, suggesting Alexander as a primary source of Wilhelm’s early American documents. Although sometimes chastised as a colonizer, Alexander proved unusually empathetic to Indigenous peoples, recognized sociohistorical continuities from pre-Columbian to post-contact societies, and addressed issues of colonial society from a hemispheric perspective, including exploitation and slavery. While visiting the United States on his return to Europe, Humboldt voiced his abolitionist position, but gained few insights about Native Americans’ fate as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 or the developments leading to their removal.

While regularly recognized as a statesman, an educational reformer, the founder of the University of Berlin, and a scholar in political science, philosophy, and literature, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) has not always received as much acknowledgment for his contributions in anthropology or linguistics. When he is paid homage as a student of languages, it is for his role as a philosopher of language rather than as a philologist or linguist. When on other occasions Western academia has remembered Humboldt as a distinct linguist, he has appeared as a scholar of almost all languages except those of Africa or the Americas – and yet it is the very languages of the Western Hemisphere to which Humboldt paid his longest and most intensive attention, as evident by a set of recent publications in German. Chapter 1 offers an introductory discussion for an anglophone audience interested in Humboldt’s contributions to Americanist linguistics.

Humboldt not only offered a theoretically much more diverse program of Americanist linguistics than conventionally recognized, ranging from fundamental analytical issues, historical problems, and sociohistorical descriptions to comparative studies, typological questions, innovative notions, and programmatic statements across much of Middle and South America and eventually eastern North America; significantly, the present book also covers a longer historical period, from the early nineteenth century through the years after World War I, during which he exerted direct and indirect influences on four generations of linguists and anthropologists. Although the present discussion does not address the developments of the twentieth century, it answers a question that half a century ago Dell Hymes raised in wonderment about the continuous reinvention of Humboldtian notions: American Humboldtians then offered a long, sociohistorically diverse and rich platform for a broadly defined comparative linguistics to reinvent itself in various forms.

The third and fourth generations consisted of Franz Boas and his prime students, Alfred L. Kroeber and Edward Sapir, reflecting a distinctly Humboldtian perspective from the century’s turn through the years before World War II. Boas had still grown up in the Humboldtian tradition of Theodor Waitz, Adolf Bastian, and Wilhelm Wundt in Germany, and had even consulted Heymann Steinthal. In the United States, Boas offered the first doctoral anthropology program at Columbia University, presenting linguistics in traditional Humboldtian terms and with Kroeber and Sapir as early beneficiaries. When joining Boas’ graduate program, Sapir already brought along Humboldtian notions from his undergraduate Germanic linguistics, eventually to lead to some theoretical differences with Boas about the interpretation of language change (with Kroeber frequently taking an intermediate position). All together, the Boasian program of anthropological linguistics however reflected closely Humboldt’s ideas a century ago, although Boasians did not advertise their historical link.

In response to frequent misconceptions about Humboldt as a linguist, Chapter 2 provides the reader with a review of historiographic research options on the lives of Wilhelm von Humboldt and his younger brother Alexander as Americanist scholars, drawing on three distinct but compatible methodological and conceptual resources: (1) biography as a form of history or the historical ethnography of individual lives; (2) ethnohistory or historical ethnography of a community as a comprehensive, anthropologically conceived social history; and (3) philology as a historical-linguistic method for the analysis of early linguistic attestations, including their systematic reconstruction by triangulation with contemporaneous or modern data for closely related dialects or languages (“reconstitution”).

Over the years, Humboldt repeatedly expressed intentions to write a book on American languages. Although he did not follow through with his plans, we can reconstruct to considerable detail what his book would have looked like by building on his “Essai sur les langues du nouveau Continent” and other Americanistic writings. Humboldt’s book would accordingly have included the following major sections: an introduction addressing the comparative-contrastive study of American languages; a unit on their sociohistorical embeddings; a part on historical comparisons (with attention to their phonologies); a section on grammar (with attention to its internal analysis); and a unit on linguistic typology. Another topic might have been language contact. Major samples would have come from Nahuatl, other languages of Mexico (Cora, Tarahumara, Huastec, Totonac, Otomí, and perhaps Yucatec), Quechua and other languages of South America (Araucano [Mapuche], Guaraní, and Muisca), plus Massachusett, Mahican, and Onondaga of northeastern North America.

When called as Prussia’s emissary to the Vatican beginning in 1803, Humboldt gained access to its library with one of the richest collections of American linguistic materials in Europe, offering a piecemeal impression of the Americas’ great linguistic diversity. Shortly, he raised doubts about the missionaries’ Eurocentric analyses, their motivation of converting speakers to Christianity, and the sociocultural contexts of use. By his analysis of Nahuatl, Humboldt came to recognize the need for original in-situ descriptive-analytical research as he had pursued with Basque; but short of such opportunities, Americanist linguistics had to rely on high-quality historical analyses in their own terms (“inner forms”) and within their own, traditional sociolinguistic contexts, as made available by Alexander and others. By a variety of grammars, Wilhelm von Humboldt became ever more sensitive to notions of linguistic and sociocultural diversity in the Americas, but disagreed vociferously with any biologistic, racist interpretation of their findings.

Americans customarily associate the name of Humboldt with the explorer, naturalist, and geographer of the Americas Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), as does the present study; but he also appears here in a different role, although not always easy to authenticate due to a partial loss of historical documentation: He operated as a major resource person and intermediary for his elder brother Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), with new linguistic and ethnographic resources plus valuable contacts with American scholars. If Alexander too is of interest for his part as a major American liaison, it is “the other Humboldt” in his role as an empirical Americanist linguist and anthropologist who is the main subject of the present book.

When the younger Humboldt made his first discoveries of the Orinoco River ecology as part of his early American explorations at the turn of the nineteenth century, his elder brother faced similar, if less dramatic or intensive experiences of linguistic and sociocultural alterity with speakers of Basque in the Spanish Pyrenees.

When all was settled after poor old Mrs Price's death, it was decided that Everard and Emily should go to Geneva, Emily's spirits and health having received a severe shock in her kind mother's death. Captain Dunstan had departed the first day, grumbling at the ill-timed decease of his friend's remaining parent. Alixe and her mother made their melancholy adieus and returned to the cottage. Here, Alixe speedily recovered her spirits. The bright side of the picture was constantly before her and with the sanguine disposition of youth she foresaw no obstacles now that Everard had explained himself. His impassioned tone rung in her ear when she was alone and she conjured up plans innumerable for the future for Everard's happiness and advantage. Sometimes indeed, the shriek which had interrupted their interview weighed on her spirit and appeared like an evil omen to secure her from dreams of happiness. But the cloud soon past away and left all sunny as before. It was at this juncture that Charles St Clair returned and our readers have already been informed of the events which followed. When made acquainted with the outline of Alixe's history since his departure, by means of her journal, he generously resolved never by word or look to remind his adopted sister that he had ever wished to be other to her than a fond visitor. His love was too pure, too perfect, to allow even in his solitary hours all the bitterness of his regret.

“After all,” would he say, “ought I not to prefer Alixe's happiness to my own? Is it possible I was selfish enough for a moment as to reproach her for a natural feeling? If she is happy, that is all I desire and I think. Nay, I am sure, I could rejoice with her and love those she loved.” Sometimes his heart would ache, in spite of his resolutions, when he thought of Everard Price, whom he endeavoured to clothe with perfection to make him worthy of Alixe. And as the day drew nearer for their departure for town, he almost wished himself at sea again.