The Atlas Linguarum Europae - A Brief Presentation

The Atlas Linguarum Europae (ALE) has been in existence for over a quarter century now. Recently fascicle 6 of volume I appeared (Viereck ed. 2002), fascicle 7 is with the publisher in Rome and the manuscripts of fascicle 8 are now being prepared for publication. At our last annual Editorial Board Meeting that was held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in late May 2006, a number of notions considered for publication in fascicle 9 were presented and discussed. In 2005 Professor Nicolae Saramandu succeeded me as President of ALE and the responsibility for the continuation of the work of ALE has now passed into his hands. The ALE can be called a linguistic atlas of the fourth generation, being preceded by regional and national atlases as well as by atlases of language groups. Atlases of the fifth type, i.e. on entire language families such as Indo-European, or on the final type, namely a world linguistic atlas, do not exist as yet. The ALE is the first continental linguistic atlas. Its frontiers are neither political nor linguistic but simply geographic. The choice of the continent has nothing to do with Eurocentrism but only follows from the present state of research. The linguistic situation in Europe is quite complex. No fewer than six language families are present here: Altaic, Basque, Indo-European, Caucasian, Semitic and Uralic. In these language families altogether 22 language groups, such as Germanic and Romance, can be counted. These, in turn, consist of many individual languages. It thus becomes apparent that the demands on the scholars to interpret the heterogeneous data collected in 2,631 localities from Iceland to the Ural mountains are very high indeed. The ALE is, primarily, an interpretative word atlas. It uses both traditional and innovative methods. Among the former onomasiology and semasiology must be mentioned. Motivational mapping, however, is an innova-