More directly, I suppose it was the belief that the morphologically "isolating" languages were degenerate in comparison with the "fusional" languages. With the lumping of the "isolating languages" in the 1924 De Geer map, I suppose it was indeed part of the racism package. Another problem is that, even though the availability of data of the Yue dialects in Guangxi and western Guangdong was already not so bad by 2012, people used very outdated methods when classifying speech varieties. One problem is that most scholars are from Guangdong, the Pearl River Delta in particular (≈ Cantonese speakers).
The classification schemes here and elsewhere are way more reasonable/detailed for the Yue dialects in Guangdong, especially around the Pearl River Delta, than in Guangxi. the 1st (1987/1989) and 2nd (2012) editions of the Language Atlas of China. The subgrouping within Yue Chinese in, e.g. It amazed me how a language map by a US organisation that has done so much for indigenous America, can have a language map with a separate colour/text for Hmong-Mien (which is good), but just a single colour/text for each of North, Meso, and South America. I had this map on the wall when I was living with my parents. The National Geographic's Voices of the World map (1999). Just some immediate thoughts a few more-recent maps came to my mind (that has nothing to do with racism):ġ. It's a worthwhile read, Boas discusses race at great length.) Again, lack of attention shows a lack of care from the creator. (You can read the introduction of that book here.
If in 1924 you were to get the assignment to make a map of the world's languages and you specialised in ethnography, information existed which could be used. Perhaps you think they just didn't know better? The "grandfather of modern anthropology" Franz Boas published his first volume of the Handbook American Indian Languages in 1911 where he, among other things, described the diversity of the Americas and lists 55 families north of Mexico. To call "Indian" a shit category is the understatement of the century, especially considering the level of detail in other areas. Contrast this with Europe and our 230-ish languages where we're even getting distinctions of lower genealogical subgroups.
For example, the category labelled "Indian" on the map encompasses 1,000+ languages of 160+ families. Indigenous languages of Americas and Australia are lumped together into two respective groups even though they each consist of very large amounts of different languages families. The black race's languages (prefixing languages) Munda languages (spoken by negroid people) Finnish, Estonian, Volga-Finnish and Samiĭravidian languages (spoken by negroid people) The yellow race's languages (Agglutinating languages) Iranian languages, together with Armenian and Caucasian French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Romanian The white race's languages (Inflectional languages)
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