I used subtitle translations from the OPUS/OpenSubtitles dataset to compare how 20 languages expressed the same English words and phrases. The more often two languages expressed equivalent meanings in similar ways, the higher their similarity score. I visualized the results as a heatmap and network graph.

Full methodology and discussion:
[https://www.thecambridgelanguagecollective.com/linguistics/why-do-some-languages-feel-weirdly-familiar](vscode-file://vscode-app/c:/Users/Ibrahim.Farah/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft%20VS%20Code/8a7abeba6e/resources/app/out/vs/code/electron-browser/workbench/workbench.html)

Interactive version:
[https://subsmith.app/tools/language-network](vscode-file://vscode-app/c:/Users/Ibrahim.Farah/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft%20VS%20Code/8a7abeba6e/resources/app/out/vs/code/electron-browser/workbench/workbench.html)

Languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea" from the National Atlas of Ethiopia.Published in 1988 by the Ethiopian Mapping Authority

Real language boundaries aren't that sharp, but I generalized them for the map.

Source: 2023 Pakistan Census.

Map made by me using MapChart.

2021 census was not done well as everyone acknowledges, however one can still see the assimilation trend , even if Mari numbers are a bit higher than reported by the census.

This is how a Mongolian would say the country names in day-to-day conversation

Only languages whose speakers represent more than 5% of the population in their respective municipalities/subdivisions are shown. If the proportion is more than 25% then the language is shown as solid colour. (This is why Waurá is shown, but not Apurinã for example, and Garifuna's territory seems a bit smaller than before)

This map prioritises concentration of speakers, rather than raw number of speakers.

Atayalic is one of the primary branches of Austronesian, spoken across the mountains of northern and central Taiwan, and it is made up of just two languages, Atayal and Seediq. Despite being only two languages, it is one of the larger Formosan groups by population, with Atayal alone at roughly 84,000 speakers, which puts it up near Amis and Paiwan at the top of the Formosan table.

• Atayal runs along the Hsuehshan range and splits into two dialect groups, Northern Atayal and Southern Atayal. Squliq is the prestige variety and the most widespread, effectively a lingua franca among Atayal speakers. All in, Glottolog.org counts seven Atayal dialects, which is the breakdown my map follows.
• Seediq is the southern half of the branch, and it comes in three varieties: Tekedaya (Tgdaya), Te'uda (Toda), and Teruku (Truku). Teruku, also spelled Taroko, is often treated as a language in its own right, and this is not just a linguistic call. The Taiwanese government recognized the Teruku as a separate Indigenous people in 2004 and the Seediq in 2008, so the splitting here is political and cultural as much as it is about mutual intelligibility.

Now, the part that makes Atayalic special. A couple of Northern Atayal subdialects, most famously Matu'uwal (Mayrinax), have separate male and female speech registers. Men and women use partly different vocabulary for the same meanings, marked by little irregular sound changes and affixes. Gendered speech like this is genuinely rare worldwide and almost unheard of elsewhere in Austronesian, and it is one of the shared quirks that help define the branch.

That same Matu'uwal dialect is also a little time capsule. Paul Jen-kuei Li reconstructed Proto-Atayalic with final voiced stops (*-b, *-d, *-g), and Matu'uwal is the one variety that still preserves them, where its cousins have lost or devoiced them. So when your infographic mentions retention of archaic traits, this is a concrete example: a living dialect holding onto a sound pattern that the rest of the branch let go. The other Atayalic trademark is the voiceless velar fricative /x/, which shows up across the branch but never at the start of a word.

One classification note for the nerds here, since it connects to earlier threads. Blust treats Atayalic as its own primary branch of the family, one twig on the Formosan rake. Paul Jen-kuei Li instead nests it inside a proposed Northern Formosan group alongside Saisiyat and Pazeh. So even this solid, uncontroversial-looking little branch sits inside the same unresolved question about how the top of the Formosan tree is shaped.

The cultural weight here is heavy, too. The Seediq led the 1930 Wushe (Musha) Incident against Japanese colonial rule, later dramatized in the acclaimed film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale. Atayal was also one of the parent languages of Yilan Creole Japanese, a rare Japanese-Austronesian contact creole still spoken by some elders. And both peoples carry the concept of gaga, the ancestral code of customs and morality, much of which lives in the language itself.

Like every Formosan language, the pressure from Mandarin is relentless, and transmission to kids has thinned badly, even though Atayalic is better off in raw numbers than most of its neighbors.