This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Branches gathers four subdivisions of larger language families, each significant enough to the study of religion to be treated as its own grouping node rather than folded into its parent family.
Germanic gave English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, and its pre-Christian religion survives mainly through Icelandic texts written two centuries after conversion, which is why comparative reconstruction across the branch's languages does so much of the evidential work a single late manuscript cannot supply. Indo-Iranian produced Sanskrit and Avestan, the two oldest large religious corpora in any Indo-European language, related closely enough that a word naming a god on one side of the split names a demon on the other. Semitic, a branch of Afro-Asiatic, carries more surviving scriptural corpora than any comparable group in the world, close enough internally that a reader of one Semitic scripture keeps meeting the vocabulary of another.
Bantu differs from the other three in kind rather than degree: some five hundred languages spoken across most of Africa south of a line from Cameroon to Kenya, Zulu, Swahili, Kikongo, Shona, Luganda and Kinyarwanda among them, named for a linguistic classification rather than a people. The atlas holds it as a language grouping rather than a religious one, because there is no single Bantu religion, though the family does supply a shared vocabulary many of its traditions speak, including widely cognate words for spirit, ancestor and the high god.