Most Native languages belong to language families, or groups of languages whose structural and lexical correspondence likely derives from their descent from a single language spoken long ago. A minority—such as Zuni, which is spoken in New Mexico, and Chitimacha, which is spoken in Louisiana—are isolates, having no demonstrable genealogical relationship to other languages. Yet Zuni and Chitimacha, like all isolates, are potentially remnants of families whose other members vanished before the historical record could attest to them, perhaps through the geographical expansion of extant families.
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Verbal·Craft and Structure·Text Structure and Purpose
hardWhich choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
A
It implies that a nonisolate language may have influenced both Zuni and Chitimacha to such a degree that their relationship to their former families is no longer discernible.
B
It suggests that the ancestral languages of both Zuni and Chitimacha were likely isolates that replaced nonisolate languages through geographic expansion in the distant past.
C
It proposes that the distinction made between present-day nonisolate languages and isolates like Zuni and Chitimacha may not have been applicable in the distant past.
D
It asserts that the historical record tends to overrepresent nonisolate languages relative to isolates, such that the origins of Zuni and Chitimacha are obscure to scholars in the present day.