This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Linguistic Groupings gathers eleven peoples across four continents, united only by the language family each speaks rather than by shared culture or religion, though several complicate that separation.
Some names are purely an outsider's coinage. Bantu Peoples, the largest linguistic grouping in Africa, takes its name from the shared word for people recurring across several hundred related languages. Nilotic Peoples carries a harder history: the label was drawn during the colonial period to replace an explicitly racial classification. Dravidian Peoples runs the opposite direction, a scholarly classification later taken up as a self identifying banner, and Nguni Peoples is a label its own speakers apply as readily as linguists do.
Language kinship can carry religion with it. Gbe Peoples, clustered along the Bight of Benin, gave the word vodun and much of the liturgical vocabulary the Atlantic slave trade carried into Haitian, Cuban and Brazilian religion. Semitic Peoples, defined by language rather than by any one faith, is the root Judaism, Islam and Christianity all arose from among its Near Eastern speakers. Uto Aztecan Peoples shows the opposite lesson clearest, one lineage running from Great Basin foragers through Pueblo farmers to the urban civilisation of the Valley of Mexico, a real relationship implying nothing about shared culture.
Mayan Peoples and Polynesian Peoples are registered here as living linguistic families; their ceremonial traditions are separately registered restricted traditions, not described on these entries. Mixtec Peoples of Oaxaca recorded dynastic history in pictographic codices, and Totonac Peoples still perform the Danza de los Voladores at El Tajin, the city most archaeologists credit their ancestors with building.