Baltic languages belong to the Indo-European languages. Today Baltic languages are spoken in Latvia (Latvian language) and Lithuania (Lithuanian language). But in the XIV Century, Baltic languages were spoken on a much bigger area. Follow the link below to see where.
Links:
The most ancient Indo-European texts were written in Anatolian languages in the 18th century BC. This branch of the Indo-European family spread over the territory of modern Turkey and northern Syria.
The Anatolian languages were spoken 3½ millenia ago, and the following link show some migrations of the tribes.
Links:
The Ugric or Ugrian languages belong to the Uralic language family. There are three subgroups in the language family: Hungarian, Khanty, and Mansi. AD 1500 the Hungarian languages was already spoken in today’s Hungary. But guess what? The language was spoken on other locations, too. Follow the link to see where.
Links:
The ethnologue tells that the Awjila language is moribund, meaning that language will vanish sooner or later.
Despite this fact found in Ethnologue, I found a blog about the language and that tells that this Berber language is used a lot in the Facebook. So perhaps the possibility to use their own language in written form is going to save the language — who knows?
I found a great website with verbs of Romance languages.
One thing surprised me: I found out that Friulian is spoken in Romania. [See map] Could that be true? I used to know that Friulian is a language spoken in Italy.
After browsing for more information I found out in a book called Ethnic Groups of Europe: An Encyclopedia that “After 1880 Friulians moved to Romania (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), where they worked mainly as craftsmen or in the quarries near the town of Greci”.
Still amazing that a language survives there in these days!
I visited New York a month ago or so.
What’s amazing is that your hear so many languages and people from different parts of the world there.
Not only are there tourists coming from all over the world, but a lot of people have found their home there. New York City is home, for instance, to the largest population of overseas Chinese outside of Asia.
I took the photo at the right in Chinatown, where you could hardly see any text in English.
While Chinatown is in the South-East of Manhattan Island, the largest concentration of Hispanics is in the north, as seen on the map.
Links:
Roughly 200,000 years ago the humans migrated from Africa. And 10,000 years ago they reached the outmost parts of their origin.
With this timespan in mind, the languages that are covered on Verbix website(s) weren’t even born when the humans already had travelled around the globe.
It would be fascinating to know what and how they spoke.
After the latest ice age, Europe got free from the ice and the population could move to new areas from the refuges — or the inhabited areas during the ice age.
During this era Europe underwent the neolithic revolution, the time when people switched from hunter gathering to domestication. It is assumed that the Indo-Europeans brought the domestication to Europe and therefore won terrain over the other linguistic groups.
I read in the newspaper about the history of the Ukrainian language, and how it become different from the Russian during the Polish-Lithuanian Union.
That reminded me that I had saved years ago some maps from a site called “Historical Atlas of Europe and the Middle East”. Unfortunately that site no more exists, it existed back in 1997.
Anyway, I post the map that I had in my mind.
… and more maps are found here.
I was cleaning my old PC from files that I downloaded years ago.
Guess what I found? Well, old files from The Indo-European Database website. I kept spending time on this site in the beginning of this millennium. The site that focused on Indo-European languages featured language overviews, linguistic maps, and much more.
Unfortunately this website no more exists.
