 He is the first philologist to prove Albanian as a separate branch of Indo-European.Bopp was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855.Critics have charged Bopp with neglecting the study of the native Sanskrit grammars, but in those early days of Sanskrit studies, the great libraries of Europe did not hold the requisite materials; if they had, those materials would have demanded his full attention for years, and such grammars as those of Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke, from which Bopp derived his grammatical knowledge, had all used native grammars as a basis.