Read by region
Regions
Every region has a proverb tradition older than the languages spoken there now. We trace them region by region.
In the archive
-
Western Europe
16 essays
Italian, Spanish, French, German, English — proverb traditions from a region with a long printed literary memory.
-
East Asia
8 essays
Japanese, Korean, and Chinese proverb traditions — Confucian inheritance, Buddhist shading, and a long literary memory.
-
Middle East
5 essays
Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew — proverb traditions that sit at the crossroads of three continents.
-
Central Asia
4 essays
Mongolian, Kazakh, Uzbek, and the proverb traditions of the steppe, the felt tent, and the long ride.
-
Slavic World
4 essays
Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbian — a proverb tradition with a famously dark sense of humor.
-
East Africa
1 essay
Swahili, Amharic, Somali, Kikuyu, Luganda — and a proverb tradition shaped by the Indian Ocean and the Rift Valley.
-
Latin America
1 essay
Mexican, Caribbean, Andean, Southern-Cone Spanish — and proverb traditions shaped by the meeting of Iberian, Indigenous, and African voices.
-
Polynesia
1 essay
Māori, Hawaiian, Sāmoan, Tongan — the proverb traditions of the great Pacific.
-
South Asia
1 essay
Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, and the cousin languages of a region with one of the longest paremiological inheritances on earth.
-
Southeast Asia
1 essay
From Khmer forests to Thai rice paddies, the proverb traditions of mainland and maritime Southeast Asia.
-
West Africa
1 essay
Yoruba, Akan, Wolof, Hausa, Igbo, and a paremiological tradition that treats the proverb itself as a kind of art form.