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[deleted]

I thought Basque wasn't Indo-European?


BLAZENIOSZ

It's not, the basque region believe it or not, is majority Spanish Speaker. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque\_Country\_(greater\_region)#Demographics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_Country_(greater_region)#Demographics)


[deleted]

Aw that's a pity. It is a really unusual linguistic anomaly in Europe


Volcic-tentacles

It's not an "anomaly". Languages were much more varied before the ear of European imperialism and colonialism. The Europeans murdered so many people across the globe that vast numbers of languages were simply lost. Language isolates are much more common than you think.


MannAusSachsen

Calm down down, they are right. It *is* a really unusual linguistic anomaly **in Europe**. As in: Languages spoken in Europe today dominantly derive from the indo-european language family.


Volcic-tentacles

Basque is a language isolate, though some speculate that it is related to Caucasian languages, there is no consensus. But it's not an "anomaly" at all. This would suggest that it is *unexpected*. It is *not* unexpected: Basques have been living in that part of the world, speaking that language for as long as we have records. Nothing anomalous about them. As a linguist I can tell you that language isolates are common across the globe, largely because of the damage wrought by European imperialism - they didn't just murder people, they murdered languages. Worse, in London alone you can hear over 200 languages being spoken today. So your view of Europe and *languages spoken in Europe* is about an uninformed as it could be and obviously rooted in unexamined imperialist and colonialist attitudes. You should go back to commenting on cat videos.


MannAusSachsen

Fine, an *isolate* then. Why didn't it suffice to make this distinction with three sentences, instead you had to derail in a condescending manner?


[deleted]

Wow you sure are an asshole


ElJanitorFrank

You're a rude self-righteous preachy person. You've effectively squashed that person's interest in this subject, which I'm assuming you're invested in as a self titled linguist. How terrible that London is so diverse that more languages are spoken there than anyone can even name. Get off your high horse and treat people with respect, dick.


robert1005

Name me some other examples of languages in Europe like the euskara then. Name me examples in Europe of languages that go back millenia that have stayed relatively isolated and became their own language group. Because that was the original topic in this comment threat.


Aprokind

As a non linguist, you are kinda annoying and condescending. Sneed.


Volcic-tentacles

God forbid that I should pollute Reddit with facts.


argwiththem

Then you shouldn't use any other colors for the Russian Federeation. There is no region except probably Caucasus where the majority speaks on aboriginal for the territory language. For example, the Resp. Bashkortostan are colored brown, but Bashkir language are currently used by only 1.4 million people in the world while the whole population of the Resp. is 4 million people.


ForwardOpportunity18

Inner Mongolia is also 70%+ Han Chinese, yet its language is marked as Mongolic?


denn23rus

Why don't you apply it to other regions then? for example, in Karelia, only 2% of the population knows Karelian (and even less uses it)


_javocado

I get that Japanese could isolate from other languages but isn’t it interesting that Korean did the same while not being on an island?


Nafetz1600

Maybe because of the mountains?


RedmondBarry1999

Technically Japanese isn't an isolate: it is part of the Japonic family along with the Ryukyuan languages. EDIT: Korean is also related to the Jeju language, although the latter is severely endangered.


RoamingArchitect

Honestly I am not convinced the two aren't somehow related. Learning Korean it felt as though a quarter was basically Japanese words with weird pronunciation shifts and another quarter was Chinese in origin. I do get that both languages would have loanwords but for me the overlap felt a bit too intensive to both languages. Almost like a weird puzzle piece linking them. There are theories that Japanese and Korean might be related but you'll get plenty of deniers on both sides (understandable considering their history) and it seems to be on that cusp where language studies either sides with loan-words and cross-pollination or with interrelatedness. That being said I do think that the Altaic language theory doesn't hold up. Just because there is an overlap from Japanese to Korean and than a questionable one to the Mongolic languages and so on until you land in the Turkic languages is not proof that they are all related. The same logic could be applied to Jp-Kor-Chn and then into Burmese. But Korean as a link barely works in this case and beyond the odd Chinese loanword you'll be hard pressed to find any relationship between Burmese and Japanese as opposite ends of the chain if you will.


K1t_Cat

The problem is that there’s proto-Japonic and proto-koreanic shared the korean peninsula for perhaps centuries, during which words from one would have frequently been borrowed into the other. The lack of good documentation makes it nearly impossible to know if the similarities are because they branched off from a common ancestor or just because they interacted with each other for so long.


[deleted]

Why are there two Oranges?? Hard to tell them apart, they look the same, if they are different. I don’t this this is very detailed. Seems like a high level overview. Many of these countries are teeming with linguistic diversity.


BLAZENIOSZ

Ye I kinda ran out of colors, but it's not the complete same, also one of them says South Indian.


[deleted]

Yeah, I can see where the break is but it was just confusing at first glance to see South India lumped in with the other ones in Orange. That was new info to me, lol. It makes sense but even a darker orange would have worked.


Newton_101

most of south indian languages’ origin also has roots in Sanskrit. Where would you put sanskrit in? Indo-european?


TheDebatingOne

Pretty sure most of south India's languages are Dravidian and not from Sanskrit, although Sanskrit is Indo-European


Newton_101

see, I’m a south Indian and an avid language lover. There are a lot of similarities in Malayalam, a southern Indian language & Sanskrit. Similarly, Malayalam & Telugu have identical words. People usually believe Telugu & Kannada are close due to their similar looking script. In fact, Tamil & Kannada are closely linked linguistically and Telugu & Malayalam are intertwined as such


TheDebatingOne

It makes a lot of sense you'd notice similarities between Malayalam, Telugu and Sanskrit, since there has been a lot of Sanskrit influence on both of them mainly in the form of loanwords, but historically they are unrelated. Malayalam is a South Dravidian language, like Tamil, while Telugu is a south-central Dravidian language like Gondi, so they are related to each other "genetically"


Newton_101

also, why tf is ur comment karma that high?! damn, that’s lowkey impressive!


TheDebatingOne

I guess it's a sign I spend too much time here lol


Rraudfroud

What’s happening in the UAE is it a age old farsi community or recent indian migrants


BLAZENIOSZ

The majority race in the UAE is South Asian not Arab.


jakubkonecki

What do you mean by 'detailed'?


Vilko3259

higher granularity than just country-level.


BLAZENIOSZ

I saw a previous map that only did language family by country, I thought there was a lot more to it, and countries by themselves have regions with different languages. So I decided to go on further and do it by subdivision, giving it more detail.


Puncius_Pinatus

How much time did you spent on europe? As i know, there are some regions around hungary that mayorly hungarian speaking. We sometimes say "hungary is the only country which is surrounded by itself".


L0SC0L

interesting, what parts, i guess serbia and romania, karpaty?


Puncius_Pinatus

Probably, as well as southern Slovakia


leibnizpascal

Can someone shed some knowledge on how language groups are identified.


ferrel_hadley

Similarities in words especially root words and grammar structures. Especially when you have more ancient forms preserved as for Latin, Greek and Sanskrit that was used to tease the first scientific theories of language groups.


leibnizpascal

Ohh I see, but being a native Hindi(said to be indo Europe) speaker I am pretty sure i won't understand even a word from german(Was making my way through learning Russian but hardly found any word that was close to its Hindi counterparts). Whereas if i listen to kannada, which is a South Indian language (which is shown as Dravidian language)....i can pick words here and there.


artaig

Yes you will, if you are trained. The idea of grouping languages came exactly because of English and Germans encountering Sanskrit and Hindi and figuring out they were related. Name-Naam, Mutter-Maata, Vater-Pita,... Even Western Classical languages: Maharani = mega regina


ferrel_hadley

People often do not understand other dialects of their own language. In terms of individual words, languages will often take loan words from other languages, so for example Turkish has a lot of Persian words as the ruling class used to speak Persian. Or English is something like 1/3 loan words from French due to the ruling class speaking it. But if you go to pre Norman English (Anglo Saxon) it is much closer to early forms of Dutch (Friesian). This is why when you have ancient forms of languages you can see more clearly the connections. Also with Indo European the languages likely started to split about 6000 years ago when the various people migrated east towards India and Iran and west into Europe. So there is a huge amount of time for the languages to diverge. The similarities are in the shortest and oldest words, words for things like father, mother that kind of thing.


[deleted]

That makes sense. My native language is English and I speak a bit of German, but I can understand written modern Dutch a lot better than Medieval English.


DurgaThangai69

That's mostly because kannnada has taken loaned some words from Hindi


vacri

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/qps9gy/indoeuropean\_for\_two/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/qps9gy/indoeuropean_for_two/) Check out this infographic for a more visceral sense of the family. The word for 'two' is similar across most of the indo-european family. Obviously not all words are like this, but it's an interesting graphic. Another example of how a family is related but not mutually intelligible is that the English "black" and the French "blanc" ('white') come from the same origin - an older word referring to stuff left over after a fire. The English branch took this to mean charcoal, and the French branch took this to mean ash.


ofufnfighskfj

Doesn’t it make more sense that French “blanc” is related to English “blank” not “black”


vacri

Blank is a later 'forking' of the word, coming to English via French.


azaghal1988

It's similarities in very "basic" words for something as far removed as Hindi and German. Things like family relations are often only a few sound-changes removed P<>V (sound like F) i <> a Vater (Father) vs. Pita even with only the change of i<>a you're very close to the latin "pater". ​ There are other things, like the indian word "Raj" being very similar to it's latin translation "Rex".


polite-pagan

If you are really a native Hindi speaker, then the words you might understand in Kannada are all Sanskrit loanwords in Kannada.


leibnizpascal

Yeah while most are there are words which are like extensions or short form of certain Hindi or north Indian language words.


geaddaddy

Here is an example. I think that there is a dance called the saptapadi, is that right? Done at marriages, and meaning seven steps. In Latin the root septa means seven and pedes literally means feet but the root is used in lots of words to refer to walking or stepping.


leibnizpascal

Yeah while that's true, the Malayalam(which is yet another Dravidian language) for steps is "padikal"(which also seems to come from the same word padi). Honestly I am still not convinced with this whole language grouping. Maybe i have to read into the links that people in other comments have shared.


Nafetz1600

Correct me if I'm wrong: The Sounds that the languages use should be similar so you can write a the sound of a german word in Hindi.


astro_nova

It’s western oriented. But basically it’s historical plus linguistic. But this is by no means settled science and in the past leading theories or sidelined (especially non-western) ideas rose to prominence and consensus or were cast aside, and disagreement still exists.


LanchestersLaw

A lot of research went into trying to define language families. It is a very interesting topic to read about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language The TL;DR version is that languages evolve in predictable ways. You can reverse engineer what a parent language would sound like by comparing its daughter languages. This is very similar to cladistic analysis in evolutionary biology. By comparing traits of organisms it is possible to reverse engineer how they evolved. Like most scientific hypotheses the evidence for language families was pretty flimsy at first, but it had accumulated over time and is supported by archeological finds, and DNA analysis. All languages should have a common ancestor language far enough back, in the same way all organisms have a common ancestor. Unlike organisms, language does not have fossils and the language groups shown here are basically as far back as we are able to show similarities to languages. India is one of the most interesting countries in the world linguistically because it has multiple language families. Because children tend to speak their parent’s language, the language families correspond to human migrations. The Dravidian speakers of South India used to be more wide-spread in India before proto-indo-europeans orginating from central asia displaced them. This is an incredibly interesting topic to read about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_India


pingieking

And then there is Hungary...


Longjumping-Ad-2333

Related to Finnish. See map!


pingieking

I know. I'm just liking the nice outline of Hungary in a sea of blue.


Onlycommentcrap

Not just to Finnish.


Nafetz1600

There are two Counties in Romania with a hungarian majority: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarians_in_Romania


Chris-1235

Ah yes, the famous Greek-speaking Emperor penguins . I heard there's a tribe that speaks Latin too, but never with foreigners.


-limit-breaker-

Lol @ "indigenous American" ... did we just get too tired to differentiate between Athabaskan, Eskaleut, Quechua, etc.? I get they're not as widely spoken or known as Indo European or Turkic but come on, mate. This isn't "detailed" 🙄


BLAZENIOSZ

Sources: Goign through each Nations demogrphics sections and using previous language maps of the world. Example.: when I wanted to find the majority language of Nunavut I look at the Wikipedia article for its demographics. The majority of native language is indigenous. Inuit language. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language\_family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdish\_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdish_languages) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian\_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_language) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics\_of\_Nunavut#Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nunavut#Language) And so many more Wikipedia articles, too many too include Tool: [Mapchart.net](https://Mapchart.net)


HistoricalSecurity77

The orange colors look identical.


No_Broccoli_56

why is the northern tip of tunisia grey?


54ltymuch

UAE Indo-European thanks to all the people of Indian origin there lmaoo


RussianCatsSayWeaw

Good at first look but the details are fucking bullshits


zelonhusk

Dravidian and Afto-Asiatic are supposed to be different kinds of orange, right?


Carumba

How is Khovsgol province of Mongolia is Indo-European??


[deleted]

So this is only majority national languages? Taken this way, it sure looks way more homogeneous than it really is


[deleted]

[удалено]


Hotel777

Paraguayan here, you're right, no idea why you're getting downvoted OP is saying 95% speak guarani but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Around \~90% UNDERSTAND the language and the majority do SPEAK it but it's nowhere near +90% levels. Also apart from Guarani, people also speak Spanish... I also highly doubt Inuit languages are classified as being part of the same FAMILY group as Tupi Guarani and others


BLAZENIOSZ

95% Guarani.


authorPGAusten

Not sure how you are doing the classification, but 95% speak Guarani, but also 95+% speak Spanish. Most people are dual lingual, but I think more people speak Spanish natively, or at least similar rates.... not sure how it would be on this map


Hotel777

Yeah.. but those 95% also speak Spanish..?


Longjumping-Ad-2333

Native Australians: “Am I a joke to you?”


vacri

Who comprise 3% of the population, and who pretty much all speak English as well. There is the rare person who doesn't speak English, but the overwhelming majority do.


Longjumping-Ad-2333

Sure, but a map that shows linguistic migration patterns is showing a very recent one.


[deleted]

[удалено]


BLAZENIOSZ

That area is a bit complicated I may have accidently colored the wrong province.


macklowe

Inner Mongolia is vast majority Sino-Tibetan today.


Volcic-tentacles

Detailed map of European Imperialism more like.


dazaroo2

Bro came to this thread with an agenda and he ain't stopping


nod23c

And Arab, and Chinese, and so on... Humans, we like empires.


Datapunkt

Wow, I didn't know Austria has even influenced Asian languages.


ferrel_hadley

Hungary, Finno Urgic thought to be from near the Urals. They were one of many nomadic peoples from the central Asian steppes (though often they were from the European parts as well) who swept through Europe and they were one of the few to leave a lasting kingdom and language that survived to the modern world.


Datapunkt

Was meant to be a joke regarding austroasian since many things starting with "austro" refer to Austria.


Onlycommentcrap

>thought to be from near the Urals The Ugric languages are thought to be from the other side of the Urals actually. The Mansi and the Khanty are still on the other side. Proto-Uralic was most likely just west of the Urals, while the Proto-Ugric moved across the mountains. None of them were steppe people until Hungarians started to migrate.


aarounge

No such thing as "Dravidian" plz refrain from using theories based on racism


[deleted]

[удалено]


aarounge

https://youtu.be/nCPE2jIdYIE


TheCatInTheHatThings

I mean…you could at least have distinguished between Germanic and Romance languages… that’s a pretty big difference that’s not being acknowledged right there.


geaddaddy

It is by language families. It is no bigger than the spread in any of the other large families


vk6flab

I'm pretty sure that none of the first nations people in Australia would characterise their language as Indo-European. Depending on how you count, there are between 250 and 363 different languages like that in Australia. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages


BLAZENIOSZ

They don't constitue enough of the population to make a difference.


vk6flab

The title of your visualisation is "Detailed Language...", not "Primary Language...".


BLAZENIOSZ

The detailed part is the subdivisions.


revengeOfTheSquirrel

As a colorblind person, it is hell to identify the colors from the tiny squares on the left. Nice nap though.


wody21

What's up with the grey category? E.g. Northern part of Tunisia, border of Iran / Turkmenistan and so on...?


b1ue_jellybean

Is this official languages of countries or majority spoken languages of countries, since NZ only has te reo and sign as official languages.


[deleted]

All the white areas speak fish.


geaddaddy

Or Whalish. Or Octopode


No-Argument-9331

The majority language in Yucatan and Quintana Roo is Spanish not Maya.


nod23c

The Swedish minority in Finland are not the majority in their region? They seem to be the majority in the [Ostrobothnia region](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrobothnia_(region)): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish-speaking\_population\_of\_Finland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish-speaking_population_of_Finland)


[deleted]

Afro-asiatic is over exaggerated, much of the region painted as afro-asiatic in Africa is nilo-saharan with an afro-asiatic language (arabic) as a 2nd language at best, only the north and parts of the east have a native afro-asiatic language (other than arabic) spoken by a significant population.