Because languages of New Guinea and Australia are considered in the same chapter of this book, one might expect them to be related. Because of the geographical proximity between the two areas, the idea that the languages spoken there constitute one family has been explored by several linguists; however, the question remains open. Until recently, no plausible link had been found, in part because researchers looked in the wrong place: the south coast of New Guinea, immediately above the Torres Strait and the Arafura Sea. It is a logical place to look, for sure, as it is the area closest to Australia, but unfortunately, no languages spoken there today show any evidence of a link to languages of Australia. More recent studies suggest that a possible link between languages of Australia and New Guinea may be found in an unexpected location: in the highlands of New Guinea (see Foley 1986: 271–275).

Imagine a Martian scholar who aims to understand the linguistic diversity on Planet Earth. One way this imaginary alien scholar might go about this research is by exploring Google Translate. However, doing so would offer our imaginary extraterrestrial scholar only a very biased and rather misleading picture. As of November 2022, Google Translate supports 134 languages, which constitutes about 2 percent of the world’s 7,151 languages identified by Ethnologue. Not only is it a small fraction of the total number of languages, but the list is not representative of global linguistic diversity: of the 134 Google Translate languages, 64 (or nearly half) are Indo-European languages.

Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist considered to be one of the fathers of modern linguistics, in his Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics, 1916) defines language as “a product of the collective mind of linguistic groups”. But this definition hardly helps us in drawing the boundary between one language and another: how can we tell who is or is not to be included in any given “linguistic group”? Take any two people, even close relatives, and they are sure to speak at least slightly differently. Yet it is not insightful to say that there are as many languages in the world as there are individual people!

The region that we focus on in this chapter is larger than the one traditionally designated as the Middle East, yet smaller than the political term “the Greater Middle East”, which was coined during the second George W. Bush administration in the USA to refer to the contiguous Muslim world, a larger zone extending beyond Egypt’s western and southern borders – in North Africa and the Horn of Africa – and beyond Iran’s eastern borders – in parts of South Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Linguistically speaking, the region of interest to us here stretches from Egypt in the west to the western border of Iran in the east and from the southern border of Turkey in the north to Yemen and Oman in the south. (Languages of Iran and Turkey themselves are discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively.)

In Chapter 2 we discussed how a British jurist and colonial bureaucrat Sir William Jones established a connection between the classical language of India, Sanskrit, and the classical languages of Europe, particularly Latin and Greek. This discovery, together with a previously uncovered link between Romani and its “sibling languages” spoken in northern India, became the cornerstone of the discipline of historical linguistics. Sir William Jones, however, was not the first one to note the affinity among Indo-European languages of Europe and India. Nor was he the first one to add Sanskrit to the family list. That link was first discovered by the sixteenth-century English Jesuit Thomas Stevens (Masica 1991: 3).

In this chapter we focus on languages spoken in eastern Asia, which belong to three major language families in the region: Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, and Tai-Kadai. In the past, Vietnamese and some other languages of Southeast Asia were classified as members of the Sino-Tibetan family; however, now they are treated as constituting a family of their own and their similarities to Chinese are now credited to language contact by most linguists outside of China, though in the Chinese scholarly community some of the Southeast Asian languages are still included in the Sino-Tibetan family. We also consider Korean and Japanese, whose family affiliation is still hotly debated. Section 8.5 examines the writing systems used in languages from different language families; as we will see in that section, contact played an important role in the spread of writing in this region.

In this chapter we examine indigenous languages spoken from Mexico to the southern tip of South America. It is rather difficult to find an appropriate geographical designation for this region: “Central and South America” does not include Mexico, “Mexico, Central and South America” is too awkward, “Middle and South America” includes two partially overlapping regions, whereas “Latin America” generally excludes Guyana and Suriname, where the official languages are English and Dutch, respectively. Moreover, “Latin America” suggests that the discussion revolves around Spanish and Portuguese rather than indigenous languages of the region. After careful deliberation, I have chosen to use “indigenous languages of Latin America and the Caribbean”, with the understanding that the former region is to include Guyana and Suriname, and the focus of the discussion is not on European languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch, but on languages that are indigenous to the region.

The conclusion looks back over the myths to consider where we’ve come from and where we can go next. We already have language patterns, subconscious knowledge, and interest in language to help us. With awareness of timeworn myths, we can move to a new metaphor for writing: a continuum with shared purposes, as well as distinct patterns. A continuum allows us to recognize the range of informal and formal, personal and impersonal, interpersonal and informational writing our world demands. It allows us to see that all these kinds of English writing are systematic, meaningful, similar, and distinct. It allows us to approach the full continuum as fodder for knowledge and exploration.