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A racist map of the world's languages

Detail of world map of languages and races from 1924. The legend outlines language groups of the “yellow race”.

In order to move forward towards racial and social justice as a discipline we must become familiar with our history and the ways in which racist, colonialist, sexist and classist ideas are still present in our academic spaces. I would like to present to you a concrete piece of evidence of our racist past in particular - a world-map where languages are grouped into three races: white, yellow and black.

I started writing this blog post several years ago, but ended up not posting it because I felt there was so much to say and I wasn’t sure I was the right person to say it, nor able to cover all related content in a fair and accessible manner. With the recent publication of the article Toward racial justice in linguistics: Interdisciplinary insights into theorizing race in the discipline and diversifying the profession by Charity Hudley, Mallinson & Bucholtz in Language (and the responses and commentary), I felt inspired to share this map now - even if the post will be shorter than I had originally imagined. I think it is essential that we as linguist fully internalise that racism was not confined to a few fringe individuals, it was and is an ideology which permeates everything - including science and research.

Charity Hudley, Mallinson and Bucholtz outlines several steps which they believe linguistics as a disciple need to take in order to advance towards racial justice. One of them is:

Fully acknowledge the ongoing legacy of the field’s history of racism and colonialism (Bolton & Hutton 2000, Errington 2001, Leonard 2018)

In the spirit of that, I’d like to talk about a Swedish map from 1924 depicting the languages of the world, coloured by language families and grouped into races.

This map is part of a set of maps which was made by the Swede Docenten Friherren Sten De Geer. They were published in an atlas by Åhlen & Holm AB for the Swedish Red Cross. The atlas was made to educate the general public of Sweden and Scandinavia about the world’s countries and people.

The map in question is found on the lower part of the image below. The image contains two maps, the upper one depicts religions and the lower languages. All languages of the world are grouped into linguistic groups (such as Germanic, Bantu or Malayic) and subsumed under a super-category of race. For example, Germanic languages are of the “white race”, Bantu “black” and Malayic are of the “yellow race”.

I’ve included both a colour and black-and-white version for easier readability, and below I’ve translated the Swedish text into English. If you want to see a higher resolved version, go here.

________________________________________ Below is the text from the lower map of languages and races translated from Swedish to English by me. I’ve stayed as close to the original as possible, except in some cases where I use a more well-known English label for a category, for example “syrjänska” = “Komi”. ________________________________________ Translation:

The white race’s languages (Inflectional languages) Germanic Romance - French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Romanian - Portuguese Slavic languages Greek and Albanian languages Iranian languages, together with Armenian and Caucasian Hindu languages Singalese (Hindi-Dravidian) Latvian & Lituhanian Celtic Basque Semitic languages Hamitic languages The yellow race’s languages (Agglutinating languages) Uralic languages - Hungarian and Eastern Khanty - Finnish, Estonian, Volga-Finnish and Sami - Komi and Samoyedic Altaic languages - Turkic languages - Mongolian languages - Tungusic languages - Japanese and Korean - Chukchi languages - Aino Dravidian languages (spoken by negroid people) Munda languages (spoken by negroid people) Incorporation languages - Indian languages - Eskimo and Aleut Stem-isolating languages - Malay languages (including Polynesian) Isolating languages - Isolating The black race’s languages (prefixing languages) Bantu (spoken by negroid people) Other negroid languages - Sudanese languages - Hottentott and Bushman languages - Papuan - West-Papuan (Negrito language) - Australnegro languages ________________________________________

There is a lot to say here, and I am sure I will not be able to cover it all. I do not have the accompanying information about the construction or design of the map (if it exists).

Let us start by making a few specific observations:

- Just so it is said: as far as I am aware, historical linguists at this time (1924) did not propose that they had linguistic evidence of the three race groups as meaningful linguistic units. If they did propose such a thing, it must have been with skin colour as the sole evidence - not the comparative method and vocabulary.

- The division of three races that the map makes, “white”, “yellow” and “black”, is probably influenced by the religious and racist researcher Georges Cuvier. He proposed that humans should be divided into three races, the Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), and the Ethiopian (black). From wikipedia: Cuvier claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian, the original race of mankind. The other two races originated by survivors escaping in different directions after a major catastrophe hit the earth 5,000 years ago, with those survivors then living in complete isolation from each other. Cuvier categorized these divisions he identified into races according to his perception of the beauty or ugliness of their skulls and the quality of their civilizations.

Just.. sit with that for a while before we go on. Read it one more time.

- The creator of the map is himself struggling with the exclusive division of the languages into the three races, placing Dravidian and Munda languages under “yellow”, but noting that they are spoken by “negroid people”. I don’t know what to make of that really, but it is noticeable.

- The level of granularity alone betrays a racist attitude. There is much more detail to the various sub-groupings of Indo-European languages, while the rest of the world is represented in far, far less detail. For example, most East Asian languages are included under the label “Isolating”. “Isolating” is a description of the grammar of a language, not a genealogical group. Even though our understanding of the relationship between East Asian languages was not as advanced in 1924 as it is now, the category “Tibeto-Burman” did in fact exist. The map was made for a Scandinavian audience which may mean they expected finer detail closer to home, but even so the coarseness of categorisation outside of Europe is extreme. The lack of attention betrays a lack of care.

- Indigenous languages of Americas and Australia are lumped together into two respective groups even though they each consist of very large amounts of different languages families. For example, the category labelled “Indian” on the map encompasses 1,000+ languages of 160+ families. Contrast this with Europe and our 230-ish languages where we’re even getting distinctions of lower genealogical subgroups. To call “Indian” a shit category is the understatement of the centuries, especially considering the level of detail in other areas. Perhaps you think they just didn’t know better? The “grandfather of modern anthropology” Franz Boas published his first volume of the Handbook American Indian Languages in 1911 where he, among other things, described the diversity of the Americas and lists 55 families north of Mexico. So, knowledge and information existed. If one were to get the assignment to make a map of the world’s languages, information existed which could be used. (You can read the introduction of that book here. It’s a worthwhile read, Boas discusses race at great length.) Again, lack of attention shows a lack of care from the creator.

- The depiction of the distribution of indigenous languages of the Americas, Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand). I take it that the intention of the mapmaker was to only show the most common language in a given place and that this is why most of these regions are depicted only with the colonial European languages, with pockets of “Indian languages” in the Americas, “Australnegro” languages in Australia and a small section of “Malay” languages in Aotearoa. These red and pinkish places which appear entirely conquered by European colonisers were in many cases multilingual. These are places where indigenous languages were spoken and are still spoken today. To make the choices to not depict these languages at all.. it is a choice that perpetuates the erasure of indigenous people.

Okay. I think I’ll stop there for now lest my blood pressure gets too high. Feel free to leave more observations of this map in the comment section.

I think that there is a common misconception that racism was essentially something unique to Germany in the 1930’s. Depictions of non-german Europe during the second world war often seems to entirely erase the racism we know was there (and still is). For science in particular, there is a great tendency to ignore the racist legacy of our disciplines and to fail to address its continuation and the impact it has on scholars and research today.

I am a Swedish white woman, I grew up in the university town of Uppsala. Uppsala was the Swedish centre of research into “race-biology” from 1922-1958. This involved the measurement of skulls and the production of research which aimed at providing the state with scientific justifications for “exact racial hygiene” and “rational population policy”. I didn’t know exactly what this entailed until I became an adult, but growing up I did know the location of “rasbiologiska institutet” - it’s a local landmark and reference point still.

The welfare state of Sweden in the 50’s and 60’s was racist and supported by scientists. Antiziganism was particularly strong. In Scandinavia there is a group of Romani people commonly known as ‘travellers’. They have lived there for over 500 years. We sterilised these people, and people which were deemed “slow of the mind” or otherwise genetically undesirable without their consent. This was explicitly done for the sake of “eugenic hygiene”. This was legal and encouraged between 1934-1975. Approximately a total of 63,000 people were sterilised without consent. The peak was in 1947-48, i.e. after the war had ended.

The Swedish nation state has also abused the indigenous people of the land - the Sami. This involved among other things taking children from their families, hurting them physically and emotionally - robbing them of their past and ruining their future.

I can highly recommend watching the movie “Sami blood” which depicts this abuse. It features a particular scene, linked below, where the the northern regional school of Sami children get a visit from intellectual men from down south, from Uppsala. As the event was announced to the children, I distinctly remember thinking “oh fun that’s where I from!” before half a second later it hit me: there is only one reason Uppsala men are visiting a school like this in the 1930’s. They are there to measure these children, to collect data on their racial inferiority and justify their continued mistreatment.

Scene from the movie Sami Blood where the main character, Elle-Marja, is examined

and measured by visitors from the race-biology research centre in Uppsala.

There is another scene, which is perhaps even more relevant to us as linguists, where Elle-Marja meets a group of “well-meaning” white anthropology students in Uppsala. They pressure her to preform jojk, a Sami style of singing. It becomes clear that to them she is an ethnological curiosity - not a fellow teenager.

Abusive treatment of “undesirables”, ethnic minorities and indigenous people is by no means unique to Sweden, but I believe many Swedes and people outside of Sweden know little of this. These events are not isolated, old or forgotten - they are recent and reverberates through to today. Forced sterilisation due to eugenic reasons were preformed in Sweden all the way into the 1960’s and they were legal until 1975. The Canadian Indian Residential School system which abused ingenious children existed for over 150 years (1840’s to 1996). The Australian government took indigenous children from their families from 1909 until 1969. The list goes on. Read more and let it all sink in. Learn whose land you live on and and the history of the place and the nation state there. These are stolen generations, this can never be undone. This is not old, this is recent. Let it become part of your world - because it already is. Wether you like it or not.

The map which prompted this post was published in 1924, a decade before the eugenic force sterilisation laws came into effect in Sweden. Extremely racist ideas were included in educational material for the general public without question. It was obvious, this is the way things are and this is what we should tell our children. There are three races, and here are their languages.

No only are these events more recent than you may like to think, racism is still around - also in academia. For this post, I focussed on events decades past and outside of linguistics. If you haven’t already, go read the paper by Charity Hudley, Mallinsson and Bucholtz in Language and the following responses to learn more about race in linguistics as a discipline today.

possessivesuffix

The Ridiculous Effectiveness of the Comparative Method

A Case from Daatsʼíin

I started poking around with Daatsʼíin upon finding yesterday a 100-word Swadesh list comparing it with two dialects of Gumuz, and wanting to see how much of a Proto-Gumuz could be wrung out of the 89 matches. A decent bit turns out to be indeed doable.

With data running this low though, it will be inevitable that there will be sound correspondences that are plausible but cannot be proven regular. E.g. Daatsʼíin /ɗa-/ ‘to go’ corresponds to Southern Gumuz /ɗá-/, Northern Gumuz /tsá-/; and D /áɗa/ ‘I’ corresponds to SG /ára/, NG /áɗa/. In both cases we have Daatsʼíin /ɗ/ corresponding to a /ɗ/ also somewhere in Gumuz proper, and thus probably these sound correspondences both go back to Proto-Gumuz(ic) *ɗ. But without further data I cannot know if initial fortition to /ts/ or medial lenition to /r/ should be considered regular or irregular. (In fact I don’t even know if limitation to initial / medial position is an actual rule of conditioning, though from general typology of sound change I can assume that *ɗ > r should be more probable medially, *ɗ > ts more probable initially.)

The data still suffices to demonstrate also some non-trivial regular sound correspondences. One clear case is that velar consonant + w + a in Gumuz proper corresponds to plain velar + rounded vowel in Daatsʼíin, with at least five good examples and one more dubious:

D /bekʼo/ ~ G /béékʼwa/ ‘hair’

D /ɗakʼu/ ~ NG /dúkʼwa/ ‘smoke’

D /kʼófakʼu/ ~ SG /kʼófagwa/ ~ NG /kʼwáʃákwa/ ‘navel’

D /kʼókéé/ ~ SG /kʼoca/ ~ NG /kʼwaca/ ‘eye’

D /mágúŋkú/ ~ SG /magókwa/ ~ NG /magáákwa/ ‘night’

? D /voko/ ~ G /ʒákwá/ ‘bone’ (no parallels for /vo/ ~ /ʒa/)

Which side is more original however? No way to tell off the cuff: both Proto-Gumuz *Kwa > Daatsʼíin /Ko ~ Ku/ (seemingly /o/ in 1st syllables, /u/ in 3rd syllables; both options attested in the 2nd syllable) and PG *Ko > Gumuz proper /Kwa/ would be perfectly reasonable sound changes. One option would be to try to dig out data from the more distantly related Koman languages to see what they might point to. Another would be to note that also Southern Gumuz has /kʼo-/ in ‘navel’ and ‘eye’, which could suggest that /Ko/ is an archaism and /Kwa/ is an innovation. However, another argument still points at the opposite: Gumuz proper also allows /Ko/ sequences. Only two of them seem to find Swadesh list cognates in Daatsʼíin, both telling in their own ways however:

D /kʼaw/ ~ G /kʼóá/ ‘dog’

D /kʼôs/ ~ G /kʼósa/ ‘tooth’

In the first we have a word-final labiovelar /w/ in D. If the PG form was something like *kʼawá, the word-medial *w could probably have conditioned preceding *a > o in G, giving some degree of independent confirmation for spreading of rounding from consonants to vowels. The second then should have become G ˣ/kʼwása/ if the /Ko/ ~ /Kwa/ correspondence came from original *Ko. Again, due to lack of data we cannot show either of these correspondences to be regular. But at least they already suffice to show that the hypothesis PG *Kʼwa > D /Ko/ is better than the opposite.

—

Anyway, today I follow up by reading the actual grammar of Daatsʼíin, as linked in my previous post. Guess what jumps at me around noun inflection? Several nouns are pluralized with a prefix of the shape /Cáá-/, with the initial consonant reduplicated from the noun. There are some complications however…

So why is ‘guests’ /kwáákodar/ rather than /káákodar/? Clearly because, at one time, the word-initial consonant to be reduplicated was not /k/ but *kw! That is, /kodar/ : /kwáá-kodar/ comes from earlier *kwadar : *kwáá-kwadar, and *kwa then develops into /ko/, exactly as I have already predicted on the basis of just a handful of Daatsʼíin–Gumuz comparative data.

This is what I would call “ridiculously effective”: any sound law supported by just half a dozen good etymologies and not contradicted by other data is already going have pretty good odds of being correct. Quantity matters some, but in practice, going from 3 examples to 6 examples is already a much bigger improvement than going from 6 to 60 (or 60 to 600).

(As for why the plural prefix remains /kwáá-/ instead of also turning into ˣ/kóó-/ or ˣ/kóá-/ — per Ahland’s closer description in the grammar, what she transcribes as long /aa/ and short /a/ are phonetically realized as [a(ː)] and [ə] respectively. So “*Kwa > *Ko” is phonetically really rather *Kw[ə] > *Ko, and actual open [a] would seem to be not affected.)

linguisticalities

Unlocking the Secrets of Click Languages | CNRS News

kephas-rolling

Namuyi phonology

I’m posting daily about the phonologies of the world languages (except Indo-European ones) and I stumbled upon one that is really standing out after seeing this post. It’s the Namuyi language, of the Sino-Tibetan family.

Both the vocalic and consonantal sets are very interesting! Let’s start with the

Consonants

First, I like that all the plosives are contrasted according to the same 3-way distinction plain voiceless / aspirated voiceless / voiced, even the uvular ones! Usually the uvulars are the one to break the symmetry. This distinction also applies to the alveolar affricates

Talking about the affricates, let’s mention the heterorganic bilabial–retroflex alveolar /pʰʂ/ ! Heterorgarnic affricates are pretty rare worldwide!

Also, we have to talk about that row of bilabial trills! The trill /ʙ/ is pretty rare on its own, but it is here part of a cluster, with both voiceless and voiced variants on the onset! Their status as legitimate phoneme was debated in many studies, which either considered these trilled stops as merely allophonic (Yǐn Wèibīn (2016)) or didn’t recognise them altogether (Sun 1991). Pavlík (2017) (link at the end) proposed a revised version of earlier charts that incorporates these trills as full-time members of Namuyi’s phonological stock.

I also have to mention the post-nasalised glottal fricative /ɦⁿ/

Word-initial clusters in Namuyi is also quite interesting:

Not only does Namuyi possess pre-stopped bilabial trills, but they’re also part of prenasalised clusters!

Let’s move on now to the

Vowels

Monophthongs

Namuyi has a system of 10 plain vowels, with a clear divide: front vowels are unrounded and back vowels are rounded, although allophony allows /ʉ/ ==> [y]

Out of these 10 vowels, 8 can be nasalised and contrastive: /ĩ ỹ ẽ ã ə̃ õ ũ/. What’s more, Namuyi possesses 2 R-coloured vowels /ɚ ɛʴ/, another rare feature in phonologies across the world!

Diphthongs

Things start to get tricky when it comes to diphthongs as there are disagreements regarding their nature and number. Nishida (2013) counts 9, while Sun (1991) has 19 & Huáng (1992) has 24 in final positions (presented in order)

———

——-

On top of that, we now have to account for

Tones

Pavlík mentions that there are 6 possible tone contours, but only 4 words are uttered with 2 of the tones, therefore there may be only 4 tonemes

Here are the sources:

The Description of Namuzi Language, Štěpán Pavlík (2017) https://cutt.ly/vyvOK5r

Phonetics and Phonology of Dzolo dialect of Namuyi, Fuminobu Nishida (2013) https://cutt.ly/KyvOKy0

typhonbaalhammon

A look at what it means for a language to be an isolate, and how to study isolates.

Excerpt :

There is nothing unusual about isolates; there are 129 isolates in the world.

Language isolates make up over one third of the language families in the world’s total of c.350 independent families (including isolates).

Language isolates are not very different from languages which have relatives. Isolates could easily have had relatives now lost or could diversify into small families of related languages.

Language isolates, which have data, should not be confused with unclassified languages, which are not classified for lack of data.

humanswhoreadgrammars

Language family maps

This post originates from the HWRG-blog. Please note that there are multiple authors of HWRG and that the most updated version of this blogpost can be found here: https://ift.tt/2BVeZVg. ___________________________________________ Language family maps 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 this older website. Let’s start with a journey around the world in language family maps, starting with Steve Huffmann’s map of Africa:

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

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:

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

Furthest to the north and also evident in the Middle East is Afroasiatic (marked in shades of light blue on Huffmann’s map):

Encyclopaedia Britannica’s map of the Afroasiatic language family

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.

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

The Caucasus Mountains and surrounding valleys are home to the Caucasian language families:

Map of Caucasian peoples, source: https://ift.tt/2Pso0xa

Even wider across the Eurasian continent than Indo-European stretches the Altaic language family, containing the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic families.

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

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:

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

In northern Eurasia, we find Uralic, which includes several big European languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian:

source: https://ift.tt/369hcua

At the very eastern end of the Eurasian continent, there is located the small family of Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages:

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)

Then we start slowly moving from Eurasia to South, East, and Southeast Asia. The Dravidian language family is located in the south-east of the Indian subcontinent, as well as in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nepal:

Map of the Dravidian languages, Kolipakam et al. (2018)

To the north but very close to the Dravidian languages are the Munda languages, one of the subfamilies of Austroasiatic, which spreads all the way from the eastern Indian subcontinent to Malaysia:

Map of the Austro-Asiatic languages by Pinnow (1959), as cited by Sidwell (2009)

The Austroasiatic languages (also known as Mon-Khmer) are intermingled with a whole range of other families, including Indo-European and Dravidian in India, and Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Sino-Tibetan in Southeast Asia. Sidwell (2009: 3-4) comments on how little is known regarding the internal relationships of the Austroasiatic, which must be so interesting given their dispersal and interaction with languages from other families. The following is a map of the Hmong-Mien language family from The Language Gulper:

Map of the Hmong-Mien language family from The Language Gulper

The following are two maps of the Tai-Kadai family, one from Encyclopaedia Britannica and one from Wikipedia:

Encyclopaedia Britannica’s map of the Tai-Kadai language family

source: https://ift.tt/2BTMojh

This leaves us with the last huge family of the Eurasian continent, Sino-Tibetan. The first map is another map from The Language Gulper:

Map of the Sino-Tibetan language family from The Language Gulper

The second is a really nice map from Sagart et al. (2019), a recent study on the age of origin and the homeland of Sino-Tibetan:

Map of the Sino-Tibetan language family from Sagart et al. (2019)

For Austronesian, the second-largest language family of the world, there are various maps below. The first is from Bellwood (2013), displaying migration patterns. The second is a points map giving internal classifications on the basis of the phylogenetic analyses by Gray et al. (2009). The third I got from Hedvig and is a map of Oceania including Australia:

Map of population movements part of the Austronesian expansion from Bellwood (2013: 192)

Map on the Austronesian expansion from Gray et al. (2009)

Languages in Oceania by language family, courtesy of Hedvig Skirgård

As can already be seen in the map just above - the island of New Guinea is incredibly diverse, home to many Austronesian languages but also to the many Papuan language families. Muturzikin has a great map of these which is too big for me to copy here; what does fit is this map of the biggest of the Papuan language families, Trans-New-Guinea:

Map of the Trans-New-Guinea language family by Muturzikin

The same goes for Muturzikin’s map of Australia, it’s too big to copy here. Below is the beautiful map compiled by David Horton:

AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia, compiled by David Horton

Muturzikin’s map of Australia is a contemporary map, in other words it shows a patchy distribution of indigenous languages, surrounded by English. The same is true for some maps of the Americas. The following is a map of North America:

Map based on two maps by cartographer Roberta Bloom appearing in Mithun (1999:xviii–xxi), https://ift.tt/2N0CtPn

And the next two are two maps of Meso-America, the first displaying the linguistic situation at the time when Europeans first arrived in the area, the second (more or less) contemporary:

Map of Meso-American indigenous languages, source unknown

Map of Meso-American indigenous languages from The Language Gulper

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.

Ethnolinguistic map of South America by Loukotka (1968)

Map of South American indigenous languages from The Language Gulper

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! References Bellwood, Peter. (2013). First migrants: Ancient migration in global perspective. Chichester: 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://ift.tt/32SYdlD. 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://ift.tt/31XHuw0. 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://ift.tt/36iEOMS Sidwell, Paul. (2009). Classifying the Austroasiatic languages: History and state of the art. München: LINCOM.

linguisten

Linguistic archeology and the granularity of language change: Gerd Carling Interview SLE

We met with linguist Gerd Carling during the 51st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea on August 30, 2018 at Tallinn University, Estonia, to talk about her motivations to become a linguist, the importance of linguistics for society, and conditions for and developments of language change.

missalsfromiram-deactivated2020

So, the other day I was made aware of this SIL phonological overview of Ontena Gadsup, a Kainantu language of New Guinea, and I swear to god, when I saw the consonant inventory it gave, snakes immediately started manifesting in my apartment physically. It was:

/ʔ ɸ β s x m n r j/

I almost started saying out loud, “No, no, no, no, it can’t be true, there must be a mistake,” because that’s sure as hell what I was thinking. For a moment I was about to freak the fuck out before I calmed myself down and read the rest of the phonological description.

Because…in case you didn’t notice, that’s an inventory of nine consonants, with one stop consonant. A glottal stop. I don’t know of a specific article where this universal is cited, but in every language I have ever heard of, there are always at least two stops, and at least one of them is always (roughly) /t/ or /k/. I don’t know of any other natural human language that violates this pattern.

But, as it turns out, the phonological details of this language gave me some reassurance. Ontena Gadsup permits word-medial coda consonants - and the only examples given are /n/ and /ʔ/, though it’s not explicitly stated that others are not allowed. Anyways, as it turns out, /ɸ s r x/ respectively fortite to [p t d k] after a glottal stop. /s/ also becomes [t] after /n/.

This is very interesting - after the only allowed word-internal coda consonants, a whole class of non-stops become stops. The language is otherwise lacking in stop consonants in an extremely unusual way. This strongly hints that in the recent past, /ɸ s r x/ were, in fact, all stops - /p t d k/, which is a perfectly normal inventory of stops - but at some point were all lenited, except in “protected” positions after a glottal or nasal coda.

This would actually be very normal - cross-linguistically, it is common to have sound changes where certain sets of stops are lenited except in “protected” positions (clusters, geminates, etc). This has happened a lot in many Oceanic languages, nearby New Guinea - by Polynesian, probably the majority of Proto-Austronesian stop consonants had been lenited. The ones that survived to Polynesian often reflected earlier nasal+stop clusters. The curious thing with Ontena Gadsup is that it lenited its entire stop inventory at the same time, save for the glottal, producing a situation where a proper phonological analysis gives an underlying inventory with only one stop consonant - still very odd, but likely a temporary state of affairs. The glottal will probably become less prominent and eventually disappear in those word-medial clusters, giving a straightforwardly phonemic series of stops.

A hint that this may already be underway is that the orthography represents the allophones [p t d k] with the distinct letters <p t d k> after the glottal stop, which is not represented orthographically. That is, apparently the speakers didn’t consider the glottal stop important enough to insist on its representation in word-medial clusters in the orthography.

wardoftheedgeloaves

More broadly I sort of wonder if phonological universals are fake, but phonetic universals are real–that is, human languages tend toward some semi-balanced distribution of phones, but not phonemes except insofar as phonemes tend not to stray too far from their phones

Which, well, this is kind of sensible when you think about it; do phonemes really have any articulatory existence of their own? It’s so convenient to pretend so that we nearly always do, but if we model them as nameless token that “contain” particular phonetic realizations…there’s no reason they need to show any patterning at all

humanswhoreadgrammars

Language family maps

Steve Huffmann’s map of African languages using WLMS 16

Encyclopaedia Britannica’s map of the Khoisan language families

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:

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

Furthest to the north and also evident in the Middle East is Afroasiatic (marked in shades of light blue on Huffmann’s map):

Encyclopaedia Britannica’s map of the Afroasiatic language family

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

The Caucasus Mountains and surrounding valleys are home to the Caucasian language families:

Map of Caucasian peoples, source: https://ift.tt/2Pso0xa

Even wider across the Eurasian continent than Indo-European stretches the Altaic language family, containing the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic families.

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

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:

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

In northern Eurasia, we find Uralic, which includes several big European languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian:

source: https://ift.tt/369hcua

At the very eastern end of the Eurasian continent, there is located the small family of Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages:

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)

Map of the Dravidian languages, Kolipakam et al. (2018)

To the north but very close to the Dravidian languages are the Munda languages, one of the subfamilies of Austroasiatic, which spreads all the way from the eastern Indian subcontinent to Malaysia:

Map of the Austro-Asiatic languages by Pinnow (1959), as cited by Sidwell (2009)

Map of the Hmong-Mien language family from The Language Gulper

The following are two maps of the Tai-Kadai family, one from Encyclopaedia Britannica and one from Wikipedia:

Encyclopaedia Britannica’s map of the Tai-Kadai language family

source: https://ift.tt/2BTMojh

This leaves us with the last huge family of the Eurasian continent, Sino-Tibetan. The first map is another map from The Language Gulper:

Map of the Sino-Tibetan language family from The Language Gulper

The second is a really nice map from Sagart et al. (2019), a recent study on the age of origin and the homeland of Sino-Tibetan:

Map of the Sino-Tibetan language family from Sagart et al. (2019)

Map of population movements part of the Austronesian expansion from Bellwood (2013: 192)

Map on the Austronesian expansion from Gray et al. (2009)

Languages in Oceania by language family, courtesy of Hedvig Skirgård

Map of the Trans-New-Guinea language family by Muturzikin

The same goes for Muturzikin’s map of Australia, it’s too big to copy here. Below is the beautiful map compiled by David Horton:

AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia, compiled by David Horton

Map based on two maps by cartographer Roberta Bloom appearing in Mithun (1999:xviii–xxi), https://ift.tt/2N0CtPn

And the next two are two maps of Meso-America, the first displaying the linguistic situation at the time when Europeans first arrived in the area, the second (more or less) contemporary:

Map of Meso-American indigenous languages, source unknown

Map of Meso-American indigenous languages from The Language Gulper

Ethnolinguistic map of South America by Loukotka (1968)

Map of South American indigenous languages from The Language Gulper

catchymemes

whatjanesaw

LA Bryson

https://lbryson.com/

house-carpenter

I made a map of the expansion of the Indo-European languages based on Hamp (2013). There are some obscure, extinct languages on the map which are not mentioned by Hamp; for these I’ve made a guess as to where they might fit in and marked the arrow pointing to them with a question mark. Some of the arrows are grey, others are black; this is just so it’s easier to tell them apart when they intersect. The area enclosed by the red dotted line is the area where languages show some trace of Satemisation (change of at least one PIE palatovelar into a sibilant in a general environment [not just before front vowels]), although for most of the extinct languages it is difficult to tell whether or not to include these in this circle. Note that Hamp includes Venetic and Sicilian (the language of the Siculi) in Italic, but whether this is the case is uncertain because these languages are so poorly attested.

snaplanguage

From a linguist’s perspective, English is no more or less weird than other languages. Non-linguists erroneously believe English is somehow unique due to improperly analyzing inconsistencies and irregularities in the language.

The video for this content is available at https://youtu.be/eTMhNZ9d_mk

linguisten

And 5 reasons why Northwestern European languages actually are “weird”:

From Cysouw (2011)

Probably the most surprising area to appear in the list of geographical areas with a high level of rarity is northwestern Europe. This area is centred on Frisian. Many of the thirty languages around Frisian are variants that are often considered West Germanic dialects. These are only coded for a few features in WALS, and do not have much impact on the rarity measure. When these are removed, the remaining languages in this area, all with a relatively high coverage in the WALS data, are English, German, Dutch, Frisian, and French. The pressing question now of course is what makes these languages so exceptional? To investigate which features caused the high rarity index for this group, I considered each feature individually. Depending on the values for each feature, I took the original rarity index, as shown in (2), for each value of each language in the area. Then the mean of these rarity indices was computed, and the features were ordered according to this mean. This resulted in a list of most exceptional characteristics of this area. The top ten of this list is shown in Table 4 (the mean rarity of each feature for this area is shown in the first column).

reference & source:

Cysouw, Michael. 2011. Quantitative explorations of the world-wide distribution of rare characteristics, or: the exceptionality of north-western European languages. In Horst Simon & Heike Wiese (eds.) Exception in Language, 411-431. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. || cysouwRARA.pdf - publisher’s webpage

linguisten

From Greenland to the Marshall Islands, climate change threatens unique cultures.

The most common cause of language death is when people let go of their old language for a more dominant one, according to the Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages. People have an incentive to adopt languages of power, ones that have come to dominate through colonization and offer higher social status and better job opportunities. Languages can also die when a population is physically threatened through natural disaster, famine, disease, or war.

If you’re well versed in the effects of climate change, that list will sound familiar. As the world heats up, we’re on track to see more intense storms, rising seas, prolonged droughts, and the spread of infectious diseases — all of which can, in turn, lead to chaos, armed conflicts, and migration. And when people settle in a new place, they begin a new life, complete with new surroundings, new traditions, and, yes, a new language.

linguisten

Early hominins who sailed across oceans left indirect evidence that they might have been the first to use language

sociolinguo

annimovsisyan

I took on Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language and unleashed a decade of debate and ridicule. But is my argument wrong?

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