Southern India is Dravidian. While people of this family enter little into our customary thoughts, they number over fifty millions. Japanese and Korean also merit mention as important stock tongues. Anamese, by some regarded as an offshoot from Chinese, may constitute a separate stock. Several minor families will be found on the Asiatic map, most of them consisting of uncivilized peoples or limited in their territory or the number of their speakers. Yet, so far as can be judged from present knowledge, they form units of the same order of independence as the great Indo-European, Semitic, and Ural-Altaic stocks.
Language distributions in Africa are in the main simple ([Fig. 13]). The whole of northern Africa beyond latitude 10°, and parts of east Africa almost to the equator, were at one time Hamitic. This is the family to which the language of ancient Egypt belonged. Hamitic and Semitic, named after sons of Noah, probably derive from a common source, although the separation of the common mother tongue into the African Hamitic and the Asiatic Semitic divisions must have occurred very anciently. In the past thousand years Hamitic has yielded ground before Semitic, due to the spread of Arabic in Mohammedan Africa.
Africa south of the equator is the home of the great Bantu family, except in the extreme southwest of the continent. There a tract of considerable area, though of small populational density, was in the possession of the backward Bushmen and Hottentots, distinctive in their physical type as well as languages.
Fig. 13. Linguistic Families of Africa. 1, Hamitic. 2, Semitic (a, old; b, intrusive in former Hamitic territory since Mohammed). 3, Bantu. 4, Hottentot. 5, Bushman. 6, Malayo-Polynesian. X, the Sudan, not consistently classified.
Between the equator and latitude ten north, in the belt known as the Sudan, there is much greater speech diversity than elsewhere in Africa. The languages of the Sudan fall into several families, perhaps into a fairly large number. Opinion conflicts or is unsettled as to their classification. They are, at least in the main, non-Hamitic and non-Bantu; but this negative fact does not preclude their having had either a single or a dozen origins. It has usually been easier to throw them all into a vague group designated as non-Hamitic and non-Bantu than to compare them in detail.
In Oceania conditions are similar to those of Africa, in that there are a few great, widely branching stocks and one rather small area, New Guinea, of astounding speech diversity. Indeed, superficially this variety is the outstanding linguistic feature of New Guinea. The hundreds of Papuan dialects of the island look as if they might require twenty or more families to accommodate them. However, it is inconceivable that so small a population should time and again have evolved totally new forms of speech. It is much more likely that something in the mode of life or habits of mind of the Papuans has favored the breaking up of their speech into local dialects and an unusually rapid modification of these into markedly differentiated languages. What the circumstances were that favored this tendency to segregation and change can be only conjectured. At any rate, New Guinea ranks with the Sudan, western North America, and the Amazonian region of South America, as one of the areas of greatest linguistic multiplicity.
All the remainder of Oceania is either Australian or Malayo-Polynesian in speech. The Australian idioms have been imperfectly recorded. They were numerous and locally much varied, but seem to derive from a single mother tongue.
All the East Indies, including part of the Malay Peninsula, and all of the island world of the Pacific—Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia—always excepting interior New Guinea—are the habitat of the closely-knit Malayo-Polynesian family, whose unity was quickly recognized by philologists. From Madagascar to Easter Island this speech stretches more than half-way around our planet. Some authorities believe that the Mon-Khmer languages of southern Indo-China and the Kolarian or Munda-Kol tongues of India are related in origin to Malayo-Polynesian, and denominate the larger whole, the Austronesian family.