Steve Huffmann's map of African languages using WLMS 16





Africa is home to the biggest language family of the world (in number of languages, at least currently): Atlantic-Congo, in Huffmann's map marked in shades of purple (non-Bantu branches) and green (Bantu). To the south of the Atlantic-Congo languages, we find the Khoisan languages (marked in shades of red on Huffmann's map):

Encyclopaedia Britannica's map of the Khoisan language families

Encyclopaedia Britannica's map of the Nilo-Saharan language families

Encyclopaedia Britannica's map of the Afroasiatic language family





Encyclopaedia Britannica's map of the Indo-European language family





Map of Caucasian peoples, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caucasus-ethnic_en.svg

Map on prior distribution of Altaic languages, from Bellwood (2013: 164)

The distribution of the Transeurasian languages (Robbeets and Bouckaert 2018: 146)

source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linguistic_map_of_the_Uralic_languages_(en).png





Map of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages and their neighbours, Fortesque (2011)





Here is a second, more colourful map showing the neighbours of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family across the Bering Strait:





Map of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages and their neighbours, Krauss (1988)







Ethnolinguistic map of South America by Loukotka (1968) The same applies to these next maps of South-America. The first map (kindly brought to my attention by Olga Krasnoukhova) presents the situation at some point in the past, the second presents a more contemporary view, showing the rate at which minority languages are dwindling and dying out.





Map of South American indigenous languages from The Language Gulper









Last week, I assigned Bernhard Comrie's (2017) chapter 'The Languages of the World' (from The Handbook of Linguistics, 2017) to a class. It's a basic overview of the world's language families, which is what I wanted them to read, but for one thing: there are no maps in it. I overcompensated in class by presenting a 30-item list of maps, because some things are just so much easier to understand using visual representations. I decided to post some of the best ones I could find here, for future reference and in order to invite you to post better ones in the comments.This blog has featured posts on maps before, by Hedvig on how to best represent linguistic diversity on maps and by Matt on new approaches to ethnographies-linguistic maps . It's clear that the kind of maps that are typically used to depict the spatial distribution of languages of a single language family are fraught with difficulties. Typically they deal with multilingualism very poorly, the data they display is usually from different sources that could be decades if not centuries apart, some maps below are based on ethnography and not on linguistics and how these line up is often not straightforward, the list goes on and on.That being said, classification in terms of family membership is one of the primary means of classifying languages, and only through the history of language families we can understand how some languages have spread and others have died. Hence, the geographical perspective on language families is an important one. Here I am mostly after polygon maps of language families, and not maps per country (big on Ethnologue ) or using points (to be found on Glottolog and LL-MAP ).During my search, I found that many handbooks do not feature maps (just one example, The Tai-Kadai Languages by Diller, Edmondson and Luo), which I found odd as it seems such an obvious thing to include. There is a lot of stuff to be find on the web, though. There are maps on the Encyclopaedia Britannica , unfortunately behind a paywall but many can be found online in a reasonable format, one is featured below on the Khoisan families, for instance. Muturzikin has polygon maps on continents and countries, so not specific to families, but of course in certain cases this doesn't really matter (like Australia). Then there are some blogs with collections of maps, such as Native Web and t his older website . There is also this collection of resources , compiled by Candace Luebbering.Let's start with a journey around the world in language family maps, starting with Steve Huffmann's map of Africa:And to the north, smaller families that were once subsumed under the family name 'Nilo-Saharan' (marked in shades of pink in Huffman's map), but which are now considered to be smaller, separate families:Furthest to the north and also evident in the Middle East is Afroasiatic (marked in shades of light blue on Huffmann's map):With these languages of Northern Africa, we arrive in Eurasia. One of the most wide-spread families of Eurasia is Indo-European. In the map below, the eastern part of Eurasia including India is not very well depicted at all, unfortunately.The Caucasus Mountains and surrounding valleys are home to the Caucasian language families:Even wider across the Eurasian continent than Indo-European stretches the Altaic language family, containing the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic families.Altaic has long been contested, but is now included in proposals on a language family termed Transeurasian, which includes Altaic as well as Korean and Japonic:In northern Eurasia, we find Uralic, which includes several big European languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian:At the very eastern end of the Eurasian continent, there is located the small family of Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages:I hope you enjoyed this trip around the world, limited though these maps may be. Please post better maps in the comments. If this post is a success, I will devote my next blog to isolates, languages with no known relatives. Enjoy!Bellwood, Peter. (2013). FChichester: Wiley Blackwell.Gray, RD, A J Drummond, and S J Greenhill. 2009. “Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement.” Science 323 (5913): 479–483. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1166858.Fortescue, Michael (2011). "The relationship of Nivkh to Chukotko-Kamchatkan revisited". Lingua. 121 (8): 1359–1376. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2011.03.001.Kolipakam, Vishnupriya, Fiona M. Jordan, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Remco Bouckaert, Russell D. Gray, and Annemarie Verkerk. 2018. “A Bayesian Phylogenetic Study of the Dravidian Language Family.” Royal Society Open Science 5: 171504.Krauss, Michael E. (1988). Many Tongues - Ancient Tales, in William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell (eds.) Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska (pp. 144-150 ). Smithsonian Institution.Loukotka, Čestmír. (1968). Johannes Wilbert, ed. Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: Latin American Center, University of California.Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Robbeets, Martine, and Remco Bouckaert. (2018). “Bayesian Phylolinguistics Reveals the Internal Structure of the Transeurasian Family.” Journal of Language Evolution 3 (2): 145–62. https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzy007.Sagart, Laurent, Guillaume Jacques, Yunfan Lai, Robin J. Ryder, Valentin Thouzeau, Simon J. Greenhill, and Johann-Mattis List. 2019. “Dated Language Phylogenies Shed Light on the Ancestry of Sino-Tibetan.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817972116/Sidwell, Paul. (2009). Classifying the Austroasiatic languages: History and state of the art. München: LINCOM.