Nilo-Saharan

World Maps of Language Families, Continued

Article-Grid, Cartography, Linguistic Geography / By Martin W. Lewis

Today’s post provides five more language family maps, based again on the Wikipedia “Human Language Families Map” found here. I must again warn that the boundaries here are approximate, and that many small areas characterized by languages in a given family have been ignored. Some areas simply defy linguistic mapping at this scale; the scattered Uralic languages found in the middle Volga region of Russia, for example, are not noted. On a few of the maps, I have added several areas not depicted on the Wikipedia original. On the Austro-Asiatic map, for example, I have included shading to indicate the Mon, Khasi, and Munda languages.

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About GeoCurrents

GeoCurrents is dedicated to exploring the geographical and historical patterns that underlie the world’s current events and that structure global and regional relationships. Maps are used in all posts not merely to show where events occur, but also to illustrate the processes involved.

GeoCurrents tries to avoid taking sides on contentious issues, seeking rather to foster an enriching exchange of information and ideas. As its scope is both fully global and deeply historical, the author is usually operating outside of his own fields of expertise. As a result, mistakes and simplifications can be expected. Corrections and elaborations are more than welcome in the comments section. Comments with insulting or abusive language, however, will be deleted.

Readers interested in opinion-based essays by Martin W. Lewis will be able to find them on his personal webpage.

About The Author

Martin W. Lewis is senior lecturer emeritus at Stanford University, where he taught world history and world geography from 2002 to 2022. He earned a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, and previously taught at George Washington University and Duke University. A list of his published works will soon be made available on his personal website.

GeoCurrents’ Conceptual Concerns

GeoCurrents is concerned about almost anything that has a geographical expression and hence can be explored and elucidated through maps. Topics of interest range from the deadly serious to the quirky and whimsical.

Many GeoCurrents posts take on issues of political geography, ranging from wars and ethnic conflicts to electoral returns. Behind these writings is a conviction that the basic world political map is unduly simplistic, making the world seem much more orderly than it really is. A book-length elaboration of this thesis – entitled Seduced by the Map – will be available on the author’s personal webpage by the end of 2023, if not earlier. The introduction and initial chapters on this book can be found on this website. A summary of the main arguments in Seduced by the Map can be found here.

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