Race-characteristics can only go down by blood; but race-acquisitions- language not less than religion, or science- can be borrowed or lent.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.281

[…] a language is what its speakers make it: its structure, of whatever character, represents their collective capacity in that particular direction of effort. It is, not less than every other part of their civilization, the work of the race, every generation, every individual, has borne a part in shaping it […] That race which possesses most of the right kind of regulative force will turn out a product that is admirable; and the contrary.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.224

[…] individuals of every degree of gift are found using, each according to his power, the same identical dialect; and souls of kindred calibre in different societies can hold no communion together. Nor does it accord with geographical divisions; nor yet, in its limits and degrees, with apparent limits of races. Not seldom, far greater race-differences are met with among the speakers of one language, or of one body of resembling languages, than between those who use dialects wholly unlike one another.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.3-4

[…] it [language] is taught us by those among whom our lot is cast in childhood. And this obvious and common-sense answer is also […] the correct one. We have to look to see what is implied in it. In the first place, it sets aside and denies two other conceivable answers: that language is a race-characteristic and, as such, inherited from one’s ancestry, along with color, physical constitution, traits of character, and the like; and that is independently produced by each individual, in the natural course of his bodily and mental growth.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.7-8

[…] It [linguistic science] seeks to know what language is worth to the mind, and what has been its part in the development of our race. And, less directly, it seeks to learn and set forth what it may of the history of human development, and of the history of races, their movements and connections, so far as these are to be read in the facts of language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.4

[…] wholly discordant languages are spoken by communities whom the ethnologist would not separate in race from one another; and related languages are spoken by men of apparently different race.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.271

Against the theory of a language as a race-characteristic may be simply set, as sufficient rebutting evidence, the existence of a community like the American, where there are in abundance descendants of American, of Irish, of German, of southern European, of Asiatic, as well as of English ancestors, all using the same dialect, without other variety than comes of differences of locality and education, none showing a trace of any other “mother-tongue” or “native speech.”
- Whitney (1875), a pag.8-9

During the long past, there have been indefinite encroachments, superpositions, mixtures, displacements, destructions among the human races (or derived branches of a unitary race), as among human languages (or derived branches of the unitary human language).
- Whitney (1875), a pag.272

There are few unmixed languages in the world, as there are few unmixed races; but the one mixture does not all determine the other, or measure it.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.9

To admit that a language can be exchanged […] is by no means to deny its value as a record of human history, even of race-history; it is only to put that value upon its proper basis, and confess those limitations which can in no manner be avoided […] It still remains true that, upon the whole, language is determined by race, since each human being usually learns to speak from his parents and others of the same blood. And the marked exceptions to this rule take place in the full light of historical record.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.274

We can point out […] no reason why one race more than another should exhibit an incapacity for linguistic development, and if we met with monosyllabic tongues in different parts of the earth, we should have no right to infer their connection […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.239

We have seen that there is no necessary tie between race and language; 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.271