Jicarilla Apache is an Eastern Apachean language, a member of the Athabaskan family of North American languages. The speech described here is that of one of the authors, Merton Sandoval of Dulce, New Mexico. The Apachean group is comprised of Western Apachean (Navajo; the Western Apache dialects Cibecue, San Carlos, and White Mountain; and Chiricahua and Mescalero) Eastern Apachean (Jicarilla, Lipan) and Plains Apache (formerly called Kiowa Apache). The other major groups of Athabaskan languages include the northern group of languages spoken in Alaska and Canada, and the Pacific Coast group spoken in Oregon and California. While the western Apachean languages have a well-documented member in Navajo, the eastern group is less well known, being best documented so far in the works of Goddard (1911), Hoijer (1938, 1945, 1946a, 1946b) and Jung (1999). Differences between the western and eastern groups concentrate in consonant development and the evolution of stem shape, and, to some extent, in the lexicon; however, Jicarilla resembles all other Athabaskan languages in bearing a close morphological relationship to all its relatives.

Friulian is spoken by over 700,000 people in the far northeastern Italian region Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a noticeably conservative area which borders Austria in the north, Slovenia in the east, the Adriatic sea in the south and the Veneto region in the west. The Friulian varieties are sufficiently well-differentiated from adjacent dialects of the Romance group, especially from the Venetian ones. Some varieties of the Venetian type are also spoken within the boundaries of the administrative region Friuli Venezia-Giulia, in the east (including Trieste), in the west and in several areas in the extreme south. A Friulian-Venetian diglossia is widespread in the main towns of the region, being a result of both historical (prestige of Venetian institutions during the centuries of the Serenissima's supremacy) and social circumstances (recent immigration from the neighbouring Veneto). On the other hand, Friulian is also spoken outside Friuli, in the district of Portogruaro (today part of the Veneto region), along the Friulian border (coinciding with the Tagliamento river), as well as outside Italy (especially in Australia, the Americas and South Africa), as a result of emigration. Some groups of Friulian speakers are still found in Rumania (Iliescu 1972).

Nara is a Nilo-Saharan language spoken by some 41,000 people to the north-west of Barentu in northern Eritrea. It is now regarded as constituting a one-language branch of the East Sudanic family (Bender 1989: 20; though see Ehret 1989: 49) but formerly it had been treated as an isolate within the phylum. The fullest description of the language in existence is that of Reinisch (1874) though in that work, the language name is given as ‘Barea’, which is an unfortunate choice since it is the word for ‘slave’ in a number of Ethiopian Semitic languages; Nara is the term used by the speech community for referring to their language as well as to themselves. Four distinct dialects need to be recognized within Nara, namely: Higir, Mogorayeb, Koyta and Saantoorta.