Which statement, if true, would most directly support the claim in th…

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groups of languages whose similarities in vocabulary and grammar suggest shared descent from a single language spoken long ago. In contrast, the language spoken by the Yana people in a mountainous area of Northern California was an isolate, or a language with no demonstrated relationship to other languages. Isolates are more prevalent in mountainous regions than elsewhere, likely because challenging terrain inhibits the geographical expansion of language families. Yet it is clear that geographical barriers on their own cannot fully explain this aspect of the distribution of Indigenous languages in California and elsewhere in the present-day United States.

Which statement, if true, would most directly support the claim in the underlined sentence?

Shoshone, a language in the Uto-Aztecan family, was originally spoken in a vast expanse of Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Wyoming—a region whose mountainousness rivals that of the homeland of the Yana people.

In mountainous regions of the western US, isolate-speaking peoples historically met most of their food needs through foraging, hunting, and fishing rather than intensive farming.

Although Native languages in non-mountainous areas of California tend to belong to language families, those families do not necessarily share common linguistic ancestry.

Yana and other isolates spoken in mountainous regions of California tend to contain many more terms describing features of mountainous terrain than nonisolate languages from relatively flat regions of California do.