a group of North American Indian languages, comprising the Athabaskan family, Eyak, Tlingit, and Haida, hypothetically considered to be descendants of a single protolanguage: the genetic relationship of either Tlingit or Haida to Athabaskan and Eyak is now disputed.
a theory developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf that states that the structure of a language determines or greatly influences the modes of thought and behavior characteristic of the culture in which it is spoken.
