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:

• Phonetics and Phonology
• Syntax and Grammar
• Semantics and Pragmatics
• Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics
• Historical Linguistics and Typology

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.

Planned Tier 3 additions

• script-and-writing-systems-catalog.md — cuneiform, hieroglyphic, Brahmic, Phoenician, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hangul, kana, kanji, Cherokee, Vai.
• linguist-catalog.md — Pāṇini, Saussure, Sapir, Bloomfield, Jakobson, Chomsky, Halle, Labov, Hymes, Lakoff, Goldberg, Tomasello.

Adjacent

• Philosophy — Tier 3 (philosophy of language)
• Anthropology — Tier 3 (linguistic anthropology, contact)
• History — Tier 3 (politico-administrative languages of each dynasty)
• Religious Studies — Tier 3 (liturgical languages — Sanskrit, Pali, Hebrew, Arabic, Avestan, Geʿez)
• Compendium root

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.