Just as it is becoming harder and harder to imagine a world where communication is not simply a function of economics to be squeezed, Altera acts as a kaleidoscope for linguistic diversity, not for the sake of driving peoples apart, but for celebrating us in all our own ways.

Each language family is an insulated world of many differences. For every linguistic oddity featured in science fiction, there is a language family or isolate that was the inspiration or source for its invention. Language families contain shared innovations and suggest some form of cultural ties or ancestry.

Language families also chart linguistic evolution and thus can be helpful in thinking of degrees or latitudes of difference among languages the same way biologists chart evolutionary lineages with taxonomic ranks. To put things in perspective, there are more commonalities between Welsh and Hindi—nearly a continent apart—than there is similarities between Turkish and Greek or Basque and Spanish, which are geographically adjacent and culturally similar in other ways. Language, as a cultural layer, is thus responsible for interesting cultural ironies.

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Instead of a dozen or so language families represented in the world at the political level, more than two hundred language families and isolates make it onto the map, making it easier to trace cultural heritage and the oldest origins. These linguistic groupings are responsible for the dazzling thousand and one languages used in official capacities across the globe.