All Browse by Language

The languages this atlas describes: every documented human tongue, living or historical, grouped into twenty two bands by genealogical family per Glottolog, the primary authority this atlas follows, cross checked against Ethnologue. A language is placed by which family its own grammar and vocabulary descend from, Germanic through Romance through Sino-Tibetan and on to isolates that belong to no wider family at all, not by where it is spoken today or how many people speak it. This band excludes the writing systems a language may be recorded in, which is the separate Scripts band, and it excludes the regional dialects and varieties a language contains, which is the separate Dialects and Varieties band; a language entity here is the tongue itself, not its script or its local forms.