The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout the World (Facts on File Library of Language and Literature Series)

The historical background given sets the stage for a comprehensive and well-organized description of world's languages. Phonology, grammar, distribution of language families,lexicography and orthographies are some of the topics. The author makes good use of charts and maps. Even non-linguists will find this book easy to comprehend, because of the abundance of examples given. Though I have studied and worked in the field of applied linguistics for decades, I learned a lot from this book, and devoured it like a good novel.

The point of an atlas is the maps, and in this case the maps are horrible. Jagged lines indicate the edge of continents, thick dotted lines (bright red) indicate language boundaries, and the languages themselves are in a headache-inducing color palate -- aquamarine next to pink next to purple. There is no way that any competent graphic artist would turn out such a project, unless he/she had a grudge against the company and wanted to get revenge by producing the worst maps possible. But didn't any editor notice?

If I had seen the maps before I bought this book, I wouldn't have.

My initial response to this book was awe and pleasure. It's the kind of book I might put on my coffee table (if I had a coffee table). The use of photos of people and places from around the world helps intensify the feeling of diversity that is the hallmark of the world's 6,000+ languages. I found the charts, drawings, and maps very helpful, though I do share with an earlier reviewer a little dismay about the accuracy of the maps. As that reviewer wrote, this is, after all, an atlas, which is a book of maps; if the maps are askew, then the value of the book is seriously weakened. I seriously hope the authors and the publisher will take this criticism to heart.

In addition to the errors pointed out by the other reviewer (regarding Gascon/Basque on page 213; the languages of Belgium on page 41--French & Flemish, not just Flemish) there is no line indicating where Azeri is spoken (p 50); furthermore, I believe that the major language of Iran is Farsi, an Indo-European language, not Azeri, and not any Altaic language. Finally, the authors do need to include a chart of symbols used in the text. For example, one reviewer complained of the use of something that looks like a question mark "?" next to words such as "mi?" on page 28. Actually, it's not a question mark; it's a symbol that indicates a "glottal stop". (For a discussion, readers may consult a linguistics textbook or use a search engine like Google to look up the term.) In any case, if the authors use it, they should explain it.

All of this said, I still feel pleased about the overall quality of the book. The discussion of the relatedness of languages is very important because this is a hotly contested issue in the study of languages. There are many people who are opposed to their language (or language family) being related to any other. Some of their reasons are because of the difficulty of providing proof of such things as Proto-World or Nostratic. Some of their reasons are because they've invested lots of time in their own specialty and really cannot accept alternative explanations. Some are because of professional jockeying for position and jealousy and all the other "sins" of scholarly omission and comission which academics are liable to.

For example, Prof. Comrie was quoted on one website as refuting the notion of the Altaic language family, but that was in an article written 20 years ago. In this book, written and compiled under his direction, there is a sizeable discussion of this (putative) language family (e.g. pages 46-47). The most controversial part of the discussion is the relationship of languages like Korean and Japanese to the rest of the world. Are they related to each other, are they the offspring of a long distant Proto-Altaic, are they sui generis, perhaps like Basque? As a student of these two languages, I see the relatedness, and Prof. Roy Andrew Miller has made what to me stands as a significant contribution to the idea that they are part of this larger Altaic group. However, his is apparently a minority opinion. Seeing Prof. Comrie and his team include the possibility of the relationship tips my opinion in favor of this book as an important contribution to the field.

In short, it's a beautiful book which I am glad I bought and which makes an important contribution to our understanding of the great and fascinating diversity of languages around the world. However, authors and publisher take note: fix those maps!

The more I use this book the more disappointed by its presentation I become. I come to it, not as a language expert, but as somone who expects the information to be reasonably detailed, accurate and well presented/laid out. The authors are clearly knowledgeable on their subject and there is a lot of good information in there but accuracy and detail have been sacrificed for a presentation which is muddled and "space hungry" eg
a. All the maps adopt a strange "jig-saw cut out" pseudo 3 dimensional convention by which coasts on one side are shown as "cliffs" in a different colour. Since the maps rely on colour as a means of differentiating language locations this justs muddles the picture. In any case why do it - it adds absolutely nothing and can only remove accuracy!
b. Yet there is often little or no real attempt at accuracy when it comes to showing language locations with languages often magically following international boundaries. eg on page 41 Belgium is shown as being completely Flemish speaking!!
c.Space is wasted on totally extraneous information - eg half of page 53 is taken up with a picture of some fir trees and an icy river with the statement that this is "a view of the Siberian Yenisei river where the isolated language Ket is spoken". Yet we are told NOTHING more about "Ket" other than its family and that it is "isolated". It isn't even mentioned on the page with the map of Eurasia which supposedly covers the Yenisei area - on which this river is not even shown!! So much for this being an "Atlas"!!
d. There are plain "errors" - eg the map of "Minority Languages" on page 213 has a pointer referring to Gascon which is aimed at the Basque area
e. Yet, on the other hand, "conventions" which may be commonplace among language experts are adopted without explanation (there is a thin 1 page glossary of language terms) eg the use of something akin to "?" after a Chinese word (but not on words of other languages in the chart which mean the same - so does it show "tone"?) on page 28 which appears again on page 38 in front of an "Afro-Asiatic word "?amen = remain". so what does it mean there?
f. The use of colour is totally over the top! Charts are often shown in poor colour combinations for reading - eg black print on blue background (pages 136/7). All the maps in the section on S and S.E Asia adopt a yellow background for seas/oceans -possibly because this is the "signal" colour for this chapter (ie it is adopted at every opportunity for backgrounds, print fonts and charts). Luckily this is the only geographical area so treated and we do not have to put up with Purple seas for the Pacific or Green seas for Europe!! So why do it for that 1 chapter??

Regarding "completeness" the authors "excuse" themselves in the introduction "since it is not feasible to give the locations ..of all 6000 or so languages ..... the maps show only major languages or those .... mentioned in the text" My wife and I have just returned from a holiday in Guyana where we stayed with some Amerindians and I immediately looked up their language "Makushi". Not a mention. Was I just unlucky? But I look at all that "waste space"

I guess for the price and given the competition this book is Ok but there is still an opportunity for a good, adult Atlas of Language!

The Atlas of Language is a good surprise for anyone interested in the origin and development of the languages of the world. I am quite familiar on many books on the subject and it is difficult to see so much good text information bundled with pictorial and graphical data of such quality and content.
Besides the basic info that all introductory books must have, "The Atlas of the Language" goes a step further, showing what is an amazingly simple and good example of a reconstructed text in Indo-european, the family of languages that generated Latin, Greek and Old Germanic, and thence English. The treatment of other families of languages, like Altaic and Uralic is quite adequate and there the reader has an almost graphic depction of the origins of modern languages like Finnish, Turkish and Corean, for example. The Semitic family of languages, from where comes Hebrew and the Arabic languages is also treated there but, in my opinion, in a way very insufficient way. Much attention is given instead to the languages of Oceania (Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia) where the great majority of the languages of today are spoken.
Also of importance are the charts that portray in a very easy manner the relationship of all the most important families of languages to the primitive family of unwritten languages spoken some 8.000 years ago!!! At the end of the book one can find a whole chapter on the story of the human alphabet, a so thrilling story that one is really glued to the text, very well written.
In my opinion, the Atlas of Languages delivers everything it promised and goes a little further, being a pretty much good book, both from the descriptive as from the written point of view.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.