Regions

Western Europe

44 essays

Italian, Spanish, French, German, English — proverb traditions from a region with a long printed literary memory.

East Asia

28 essays

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese proverb traditions — Confucian inheritance, Buddhist shading, and a long literary memory.

Middle East

26 essays

Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew — proverb traditions that sit at the crossroads of three continents.

Slavic World

21 essays

Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbian — a proverb tradition with a famously dark sense of humor.

Central Asia

16 essays

Mongolian, Kazakh, Uzbek, and the proverb traditions of the steppe, the felt tent, and the long ride.

East Africa

10 essays

Swahili, Amharic, Somali, Kikuyu, Luganda — and a proverb tradition shaped by the Indian Ocean and the Rift Valley.

Southeast Asia

10 essays

From Khmer forests to Thai rice paddies, the proverb traditions of mainland and maritime Southeast Asia.

West Africa

10 essays

Yoruba, Akan, Wolof, Hausa, Igbo, and a paremiological tradition that treats the proverb itself as a kind of art form.

Polynesia

7 essays

Māori, Hawaiian, Sāmoan, Tongan — the proverb traditions of the great Pacific.

South Asia

7 essays

Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, and the cousin languages of a region with one of the longest paremiological inheritances on earth.

Latin America

3 essays

Mexican, Caribbean, Andean, Southern-Cone Spanish — and proverb traditions shaped by the meeting of Iberian, Indigenous, and African voices.

North America

2 essays

Indigenous proverb and teaching traditions of North America — beginning with the Diné (Navajo) of the Four Corners.

Southern Africa

2 essays

Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho, Shona and their neighbors — the proverb traditions that built a philosophy of personhood out of a single sentence.

Andean

1 essay

Quechua and Aymara proverb traditions from the high country of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

Nordic

1 essay

Finnish, Sámi, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish — proverb traditions of the far north, and one of the best-documented corpora anywhere.