60 New States, or What's in store for 2024? (Patreon)

The other day, Frank dropped a spreadsheet onto my lap. He had cross-referenced our Altera GaiaPolyglotta spreadsheet with Glottolog's inventory of language families to see if we had any gaps on our end. He came back with nearly 200 potential gaps. 

Altera's main purpose is to use a fictional map of the world to represent as much linguistic diversity as possible. So we set out to see how many language families and divergent genera we might have to add...

So I set out to manually check whether the gaps were due to Glottolog's conservative position in accepting proposed language family hypotheses, whether the family's languages were definitively extinct—as opposed to sleeping, which is where a language has the possibility of reawakening out of a period of dormancy or being without native speakers—because  not enough data was collected for future revitalization efforts.

From this work, I've discovered, apart from some amazing languages and language families I didn't know about before:

• 57 viable families or divergent genera/branches to add
• 43 extinct families - oddly enough, apart from Elamite, Sumerian, Etruscan, most of these definitively extinct families were outside of Afro-Eurasia. 
• 20 referenceable families to use as strata for creoles - mostly extinct families with more extensive word lists or more studied than the definitively extinct families.
• 11 families to reference for uncontacted peoples - all located in ATL Xingu

The second point is a hard-hitting reminder when mulling over settler colonialism's impact in the modern period. Well, it also could be partly due to the fact that we don't have records of early Afro-Eurasian languages in the early Holocene period. But that would still mean that the linguistic landscape of the Americas and Oceania are that much more amazing, because they were long experiments of cultural co-existence.

More importantly, the first point can be further investigated. The regions where we had the most gaps between what we currently represent in Altera and what language families continue to survive on the margins in our world are, by order of frequency:

• Papua (no surprise there; the island has nearly 900 languages and some 60 families)
• Brazil
• California and Oregon
• Australia
• Sudan and Chad (reminder of the philological problem of the Kordofanian languages)
• Colombia and Venezuela
• Peru
• Louisiana (big surprise; see the remarkable story of Chitimacha's revival from a wax cylinder)
• Texas (mostly all extinct but referable for creoles due to good amounts of data)
• Bolivia and Argentina
• Nigeria

The next thing to do, then, is to begin the fun but ambitious task of thinking about how we're going to patch the project to fit all these potential new additions. That leads me to some interesting and creative ideas. What nooks and crannies on the map can we use to fit 60 new states? 

For example, for the Kordofanian divergent branches, I'm drawing on Ottoman, Portuguese, and Italian histories in the Red Sea...

Anyway, I digress... All this is to say, stay tuned for the 2024 updates and patches to Atlas Altera!