On the map below, can you name:
- all the world's language families, and
- the major subdivisions of several of those families?
Isolates, creoles, pidgins, and unclassified languages are not included.
The distinctions between (sub/)families leans conservative (meaning no Nilo-Saharan) but is ultimately still arbitrary.
Extinct families are not included, with the exception of language families indigenous to areas that have undergone colonisation, where the most recent pre-contact distribution of languages is shown on the map.
Click the map to zoom. You may need to zoom in farther, probably with ctrl - & ctrl =, though that might depend on your browser.
Thanks, been searching for a quiz like this for a while now, and this is just golden. Has so much detail, and from what I can tell is very accurate also. This must have taken a long time to make, so again, thanks. I'm gonna grind this quiz out a few times now.
Been grinding this quiz for a month and managed to get to 130. I'd be interested in a quiz with the language isolates, and one combining it with this quiz. That'd be a monster Quiz. Good work on this one, I love it.
If you're preferring a more cautious/conservative interpretation of language families, then the relatedness of Omotic to the rest of Afroasiatic is contested. It's been proposed that Omotic is an independent language family, or, that only North Omotic (excluding Mao) is actually Afroasiatic, while Mao and South Omotic are two independent language families unrelated to North Omotic. Most scholars do still include Omotic as a single language family within Afroasiatic, but the issue isn't settled, and a more conservative approach would probably group Omotic separately, or at least distinguish within Afroasiatic between North Omotic, South Omotic, and Mao.
I am aware, the evidence I recall seeing left me feeling split between both sides and I couldn't really decide, so I went with the more traditional classification -- I had decided if I wasn't sure about where something goes I'd take the classification that people would be most likely to know