Most of the North American indigenous languages have less than 500,000 speakers; there are a couple exceptions like Aymara which is on there, and it looks like there’re a few exceptions to the “nothing under 500k” speakers rule, I suppose out of curiosity? But yeah there are millions of languages that didn’t make the cut. American historical linguistics also doesn’t seem to be an area of research that’s had much success as far as cohesive theories or visibility, and as it happens colonial genocide tends to destroy native cultures, so it’s disappointing but not surprising that it’s hard to find evidence.
The inclusion of say, Hatti, Ugaritic or Udmurt seem like odd choices to me when Na-Dene is absent. The entire PNW of the US is missing, and that was one of the world’s hot spots of linguistic diversity before colonialism.
Plus if the languages of Papua New Guinea can be condensed into a single Trans-PNG line, Australian aboriginal languages could just be put in a single line as well, surely.
You’re not wrong, there’s certainly some bias here, but not sure what the intent was, if there was any or if it was just not thinking it through all the way. I know I’ve certainly forgotten components in projects that after review I didn’t know how I’d missed or that in hindsight were crucial.
There will have to be individual languages missing, for sure. But all North American languages families and all Australian languages families seems like glaring omission. Almost all Siberian language families are missing too.
There are hundreds of languages missing from this graphic, likely because it wouldn’t be feasible to include them all
Most of the North American indigenous languages have less than 500,000 speakers; there are a couple exceptions like Aymara which is on there, and it looks like there’re a few exceptions to the “nothing under 500k” speakers rule, I suppose out of curiosity? But yeah there are millions of languages that didn’t make the cut. American historical linguistics also doesn’t seem to be an area of research that’s had much success as far as cohesive theories or visibility, and as it happens colonial genocide tends to destroy native cultures, so it’s disappointing but not surprising that it’s hard to find evidence.
The inclusion of say, Hatti, Ugaritic or Udmurt seem like odd choices to me when Na-Dene is absent. The entire PNW of the US is missing, and that was one of the world’s hot spots of linguistic diversity before colonialism.
Plus if the languages of Papua New Guinea can be condensed into a single Trans-PNG line, Australian aboriginal languages could just be put in a single line as well, surely.
You’re not wrong, there’s certainly some bias here, but not sure what the intent was, if there was any or if it was just not thinking it through all the way. I know I’ve certainly forgotten components in projects that after review I didn’t know how I’d missed or that in hindsight were crucial.
There will have to be individual languages missing, for sure. But all North American languages families and all Australian languages families seems like glaring omission. Almost all Siberian language families are missing too.
This is kind of the point. This is a big picture graph, and these languages are as interesting and deserving of attention as the African families.