Language has a setting.  The people that speak it belong to a race (or a number of races), that is, to a group which is set off by physical characteristics from other groups.  Again, language does not exist apart from culture, that is, from the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives.  Anthropologists have been in the habit of studying man under the three rubrics of race, language, and culture.  One of the first things they do with a natural area like Africa or the South Seas is to map it out from this threefold point of view.  These maps answer the questions:  What and where are the major divisions of the human animal, biologically considered (e.g., Congo Negro, Egyptian White; Australian Black, Polynesian)?  What are the most inclusive linguistic groupings, the “linguistic stocks,” and what is the distribution of each (e.g., the Hamitic languages of northern Africa, the Bantu languages of the south; the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia)?  How do the peoples of the given area divide themselves as cultural beings? what are the outstanding “cultural areas” and what are the dominant ideas in each (e.g., the Mohammedan north of Africa; the primitive hunting, non-agricultural culture of the Bushmen in the south; the culture of the Australian natives, poor in physical respects but richly developed in ceremonialism; the more advanced and highly specialized culture of Polynesia)?

The man in the street does not stop to analyze his position in the general scheme of humanity.  He feels that he is the representative of some strongly integrated portion of humanity—­now thought of as a “nationality,” now as a “race”—­and that everything that pertains to him as a typical representative of this large group somehow belongs together.  If he is an Englishman, he feels himself to be a member of the “Anglo-Saxon” race, the “genius” of which race has fashioned the English language and the “Anglo-Saxon” culture of which the language is the expression.  Science is colder.  It inquires if these three types of classification—­racial, linguistic, and cultural—­are congruent, if their association is an inherently necessary one or is merely a matter of external history.  The answer to the inquiry is not encouraging to “race” sentimentalists.  Historians and anthropologists find that races, languages, and cultures are not distributed in parallel fashion, that their areas of distribution intercross in the most bewildering fashion, and that the history of each is apt to follow a distinctive course.  Races intermingle in a way that languages do not.  On the other hand, languages may spread far beyond their original home, invading the territory of new races and of new culture spheres.  A language may even die out in its primary area and live on among peoples violently hostile to the persons of its original speakers.  Further, the accidents of history are constantly rearranging