Introduction: Geolinguistic approaches to linguistic patterns in Asia and Africa

This introduction provides some background on the geolinguistic approaches to data used by the contributors to this special issue, who were all involved in the project of making the three-volume Linguistic Atlas of Asia and Africa. The papers focus on clarifying the distributions of linguistic patterns—not linguistic matter—in data from Asian and African languages, including sibling term systems, numeral systems, alignment, and stop series.