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How did Renaissance exploration expand European knowledge of languages around the world?

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Ferdinand de Saussure seated in a formal pose, wearing a dark suit with a vest and sporting a thick mustache, circa 1900. — Linguistics Much of the foundation of 20th-century sociolinguistics was created by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913).

During the Renaissance, European exploration significantly expanded the global linguistic landscape by opening up contact with diverse regions, including Africa, East Asia, the New World, Siberia, Central Asia, New Guinea, Oceania, Australia, and the Arctic.1

Prior to this era, European linguistic knowledge was largely limited to Indo-European languages and Hebrew (with some Arabic), which shared similar grammatical categories. The voyages of discovery introduced a vast array of "exotic" languages to European scholars. However, this expansion of knowledge was primarily limited to the rudimentary collection of word lists; deep grammatical analysis was rarely attempted.1

When missionaries and traders did document these new languages, they typically forced them into the rigid, traditional model of Roman grammar, which had been inherited from the late Roman grammarian Priscian. Consequently, while the Renaissance provided a wealth of new linguistic data, it did not produce significant theoretical innovation in how these diverse languages were understood or classified at the time.1