This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Lyle Campbell's survey of American Indian languages sets out, in careful detail, the documented comparative method linguists actually use to establish that a proposed language family is real, systematic sound correspondences and shared inherited vocabulary, rather than surface resemblance that can arise by coincidence or borrowing.
That documented method matters for a language family entry because it is exactly what separates a family scholars accept as demonstrated from a proposed grouping that remains unproven, and an entry records which status a given family actually holds, since the field of religious language study has repeatedly seen proposed but undemonstrated families treated in popular writing as settled fact.
A language family entry therefore records a family's classification honestly against this documented standard, established through the comparative method, proposed but contested, or explicitly rejected by specialists, since Campbell's own work shows the distinction is not academic hairsplitting but the actual dividing line between checkable linguistic history and speculation. That same caution applies to any family whose sacred or liturgical language claims the atlas records.