[…] every person is conscious of his inability to effect a change in language by his own authority and arbitrarily; and what he cannot do, he is sure that nobody can do. And this is true enough; in a sense, it is not the individual, but the community, that makes and changes language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.149

[…] it is only civilization and culture that can bind together into one the parts of a great community.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.158

[…] out of the Babel of discordant dialects are growing languages of wider and constantly extending unity. The two kinds of change go hand in hand, simply because the one of them is dependent on the other: nothing can make wide unity of speech except extended community; nothing but civilization can make extended community.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.176

[…] that every man speaks the language he has learned, being born into the possession of no one rather than another; and that, as any individual may learn a language different from that of his parents or of his remoter ancestors, so a community (which is only an aggregate of individuals) may do the same thing, not retaining the slightest trace of its ancestral speech.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.270

Acceptance by some community, though but a limited one, is absolutely necessary in order to convert any one’s utterances into speech.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.149

It is mixture of communities which creates the great intricacy of the ethnological problem, on its linguistic side as on its physical; which renders it, in fact, insoluble except approximately; and which, so far as the history of races is concerned, makes the linguist as glad of the help of the physicist as ‘vice versâ’.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.272

Our recognition of the community, as final tribunal which decides whether anything shall be language or not, does not, then, in the least contravene what has been claimed […] respecting individual agency. Some one must lead the way for the rest to follow; if they do not follow, he falls back or stands alone. The community cannot act save by the initiative of its single members; they can accomplish nothing save by its cooperation.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.150-151

The community’s share in the work is dependent on and conditioned by the simple fact that language is not an individual possession, but a social.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.149

We know that the separation and isolation of the different parts of a once unitary community must necessarily bring about a separation of its language into different dialects […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.173