Compendium

Linguistics — Tier 3 Family Indexes

3 min read

Linguistics — Tier 3 Family Indexes

Tier 3 of the Linguistics library hosts dense reference catalogs of named languages, families, scripts, and theorists — the inventory layer behind the conceptual Tier 1 / Tier 2 surveys.

Tier 1 status

The Tier 1 root Linguistics library index is published and links to five Tier 2 surveys:

Tier 2 status

Five Tier 2 surveys complete. Future Tier 2 expansions planned: Psycholinguistics, Computational Linguistics, Sign-Language Linguistics, Field Methods, Forensic Linguistics.

Tier 3 catalogs in this folder

  • language-families-catalog — the world’s language families with branches, geographic spread, speaker counts, and 3–5 example languages per family. Includes isolates and the major controversial macro-groupings.
  • ipa-and-phonological-features-catalog — complete IPA chart (pulmonic + non-pulmonic consonants, cardinal + extended vowels, suprasegmentals, diacritics) plus SPE-style distinctive features. Each symbol with name, ASCII/X-SAMPA, and exemplar language.
  • syntactic-typology-features-catalog — WALS-style catalog of cross-linguistic features: word order, morphological typology, alignment (nom-acc / erg-abs / split / Austronesian / direct-inverse), case systems, TAM, evidentiality, NP order, pro-drop, classifiers, valency-changing, focus, switch reference, plus selected Greenberg universals. Citations to Greenberg, Comrie, Nichols, Bybee, Dryer, Aikhenvald, WALS.
  • world-languages-oldest-to-living-catalog — actual human languages organized by time and population rather than genealogy: the origins debate and reconstructed proto-languages; oldest attested languages (Sumerian/Egyptian ~3200 BCE → Gothic); ancient & classical literary/liturgical languages; the ~top-40 living languages ranked by L1+L2 speakers; vitality/endangerment/death (EGIDS, UNESCO, last speakers); and revived/constructed languages. The spoken-and-attested complement to the genealogical family catalog.
  • script-and-writing-systems-catalog — the written side: proto-writing vs true writing; the four (likely) independent inventions of writing; script typology (logographic, syllabary, abjad, abugida, alphabet, featural); the genealogy of the alphabet (Egyptian → Proto-Sinaitic → Phoenician → Greek/Latin/Cyrillic and Aramaic → Arabic/Brahmic); major living scripts by users; decipherment (Champollion, Rawlinson, Ventris, Knorozov) and the still-undeciphered (Indus, Linear A, Rongorongo); engineered scripts (Sequoyah, Sejong’s Hangul) and ASCII→Unicode.
  • major-living-languages-catalog — the full population roster: every living language with ≥~1M speakers (~350 languages, ~95% of humanity), organized by family → branch with L1/total speakers, primary script, and principal regions. Extends the family catalog’s 3–5 examples per family to the complete major-language inventory.
  • ancient-and-extinct-languages-catalog — the historical depth: dead, classical, and extinct languages organized by region and era (Ancient Near East, Anatolia, Egypt/Africa, Aegean/Italy, Europe, South/Central Asia, East/SE Asia, the Americas), with attestation dates, scripts, decipherment status, and descendants — through to the last-speaker-era extinctions (Dalmatian, Ubykh, Eyak, Bo, Yaghan).
  • languages-by-region-catalog — the geographic axis: the world’s languages by continent → country/region, with each area’s dominant families, major languages, official/national languages, and linguae francae; diversity hotspots (PNG, Indonesia, Nigeria, India) and colonial-language overlays.

Planned Tier 3 additions

  • linguist-catalog.md — Pāṇini, Saussure, Sapir, Bloomfield, Jakobson, Chomsky, Halle, Labov, Hymes, Lakoff, Goldberg, Tomasello.

Adjacent

Conventions

  • Speaker counts as of mid-2020s; rounded to nearest million (M) or 10k.
  • Living language counts from Ethnologue (29th ed., 2026) / Glottolog where they agree; otherwise noted.
  • Languages by ISO 639-3 code where ambiguous.
  • No emojis.

8 items under this folder.