Regions

Western Europe

38 essays

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

Middle East

24 essays

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

East Asia

21 essays

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

Slavic World

20 essays

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

Central Asia

15 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

9 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.

Andean

1 essay

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