[…] every language in the gross is an institution, on which scores or hundreds of generations and unnumbered thousands of individual workers have labored.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.309

The testimony of language to race is […] not that of a physical characteristic, nor of anything founded on and representing such, but only that of a transmitted institution, which, under sufficient inducement, is capable of being abandoned by its proper inheritors, or assumed by men of strange blood.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.271-272

There is no ‘prima facie’ impossibility that language, if an institution of human device, and propagated by tradition should change.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.34

Though languages are traditional institutions, they are of a special kind, capable of application to ethnological purposes far beyond any other, as being so various and so distinct as they are, capable of being looked at objectively, and handled and compared with accuracy. They are persistent, also, at least to a degree far beyond other institutions.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.274

We regard every language […] as an institution, one of those which, in each community, make up its culture. Like all the constituent elements of culture, it is various in every community, even in the different individuals composing each.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.280