The Tower of Babel. Pieter Bruegel the Elder

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23 maps and charts on language

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By Dylan Matthewsdylan@vox.com 

Updated Apr 15, 2015, 4:40am EDTAll sharing options

Dylan Matthews is a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox's Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.

”The limits of my language,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once posited, “mean the limits of my world.” Explaining everything within the limits of the world is probably too ambitious a goal for a list like this. But here are 23 maps and charts that can hopefully illuminate small aspects of how we manage to communicate with one another.

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The basics

1) Indo-European language roots

Minna Sundberg

Minna Sundberg, a Finnish-Swedish comic artist, created this beautiful tree to illustrate both the relationships between European and central Asian languages generally, as well as a smaller but still striking point: Finnish has less in common with, say, Swedish than Persian or Hindi do. The latter two are Indo-European language, even if they branched off more quickly, whereas Finland is Uralic.

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2) The languages of Wikipedia

Graham et. al., 2014

This map shows the language in which the plurality of Wikipedia articles on a given country are written. Some countries match up. Articles about European countries tend to be mostly written in their languages (though intriguingly Catalan is the plurality language for articles about Spain, perhaps because of an old breakaway competitor to Wikipedia in that country). Same goes for East Asian countries and the US.

But a whole lot of countries are most commonly written about in English, and not just countries where English is a major language. There’s not much reason for English to be the most common language for articles about Mongolia, for example. Out of all the world’s Arabic speaking countries, only Syria appears to have Arabic as its most common Wikipedia language.

German has footholds in Bolivia, Uruguay, and Namibia. These make some degree of sense; Germany colonized Namibia until World War I (committing the first modern genocide in the process) and a small German-speaking population remains today, while Bolivia and Uruguay have small German-speaking communities that migrated in the late 19th and 20th centuries. But really, most articles about Bolivia ought to be in Spanish.

Joey Stromberg has more on Wikipedia’s geography and language problems here.

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3) The language groups of the world

Industrius

This map colors regions not by specific language but by the general family to which the dominant language belongs. So France, Romania, Italy, Spain, and Portugal all get colored the same (as does Latin America, apart from tribal languages), and the Anglosphere gets lumped in with Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. But the map also illuminates differences within countries. India has a noticeable split between Hindi speakers and speakers of Dravidian languages, the latter of whom are concentrated in the lower part of the country. China’s Chinese-speaking, heavily populated, industrialized eastern half contrasts sharply with both Tibetan speakers in the southwest and Turkic speakers in the northwest.

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4) Romance languages

Yuri Koryakov

This diagram, by Russian linguist Yuri Koryakov, digs deeper than the above tree into the relationships between various romance languages. Langues d’Oïl, on top, is an umbrella category that includes French; the name comes from the word for yes (it has since evolved into “oui” in modern French), which sets the languages apart from languages like Spanish or Italian whose words for yes derive from the Latin “sic.” The most interesting items on the diagram are lesser-used tongues, in particular Sardinian, which stands out as the modern language closest to Latin in pronunciation.

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Language divides

5) Linguistic diversity around the world

Kazimierz Zaniewski/Articque

This map — created by University of Wisconsin Oshkosh’s Kazimierz Zaniewski using data from Ethnologue — shows the level of linguistic diversity in various countries, where a score of 0 means everyone speaks the same language and a score of 1 means everyone has their own language. Even though the latter is technically impossible, Papua New Guinea comes pretty damn close with a score of 0.99.

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6) Countries mapped by number of languages

Mikael Parkvall/Limits of Language

Mikael Parkvall, a Swedish linguist, takes another approach to illustrating linguistic diversity: “rendering each country in a size corresponding to the number of languages spoken in it … The ten shaded countries are those in which more than 200 languages are in use.” The clear winner, again, is Papua New Guinea, which has only about 7 million people and over 800 languages.

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7) China’s languages

Werran

Most people know that Mandarin Chinese — the official dialect used and promoted by the Chinese government and taught in most Western Chinese courses — is just one of many, and that a variety of other dialects (Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, etc.) have millions of speakers as well. The above map illustrates the geographic distribution of the various dialects on mainland China and Taiwan. But perhaps less well known is exactly how different the dialects can be. They use the same character set, and most use Mandarin in writing, but the spoken dialects are often mutually unintelligible. As University of Wisconsin linguist Zhang Hongming once told the New York Times, “The degree of difference among dialects is much higher than the degree of difference among European languages.”

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8) India’s languages

Maps of India

Just as many of China’s most populous cities (Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong) are located in regions where dialects other than Mandarin prevail, many of India’s biggest cities (Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata) are in states where Hindi does not dominate. This map is a bit outdated — Andhra Pradesh was split up in 2014, with the city of Hyderabad going to the new state of Telangana — but it’s a good indication of the levels of linguistic diversity in the country, which speaks about 780 languages total, and has lost 220 in the past fifty years.

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9) Ukrainian v. Russian

Laris Karklis/Washington Post

As Max Fisher notes in our card stack on the Ukraine crisis, maps of the Ukrainian/Russian divide in Ukraine look a LOT like maps of electoral results showing where the pro-Russian and pro-Western parties won. The linguistic divide itself is contentious — though some have adapted by having conversations where each side speaks a different language — but it’s really more of a proxy for the deeper underlying cultural and political splits that the past year’s tumults have brought to the fore.

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10) Endangered languages

The Endangered Languages Project

The Endangered Languages Project — launched with heavy support from Google and now sustained by the LINGUIST List and the First Peoples’ Cultural Council in Canada — created this interactive map to document languages in danger of extinction. This screenshot excludes Europe and Africa, which contain significant numbers of threatened languages (Nigeria and East Africa especially), but the heaviest concentrations are in Southeast Asia and Latin America. The map also makes a sobering counterpoint to the previous two, in that it emphasizes how fragile Papua New Guinea’s unique linguistic diversity is, given just how many of its sundry languages are in danger of being lost forever.

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11) Who in Europe speaks English

Jakub Marian

Many countries have more than one commonly used language, with many residents learning two or more. And due to both the British Empire and America’s dominance of global commerce and culture since World War II, English is often the second or third language people learn.

This map shows how common English speaking is in a number of European countries. Strikingly, even in countries where proficiency is comparatively rare, it still makes up a sizable chunk of the population; 20 percent of Hungary and 22 percent of Spain is nothing to sneeze at.

But the penetration rates in countries speaking Germanic languages are especially astounding. 90 percent of Dutch people can hold a conversation in English; that’s nearly as high as Ireland, an actual English-speaking country.

Some of the variation here is explainable by how countries deal with imported television programs and films; in Northern European countries, TV and movies from the US tend to be subtitled whereas in Southern Europe dubbing is more common; the former amounts to a sort of low-intensity English class, if you watch enough TV.

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12) How many languages Europeans speak

Jakub Marian

Not only are Netherlands highly proficient in English, but the typical Dutch person knows a third language as well, Jakub Marian finds in this map. The term “median” requires a bit of explication here, since obviously there’s no person in France speaking 1.5 languages. Marian uses the fraction to highlight countries where there’s a close split. “X½ for a country means that between 45% and 55% (i.e. “about one half”) of its inhabitants speak X+1 languages,” Marian says. “For example, 1½ for France indicates that about one half of the French speak two languages, and the rest speak just a single language.”

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13) The second most popular language in US states

Ben Blatt/Slate

There’s an arguably more interesting version of this map showing the most popular non-English, non-Spanish language in each state, which generates some really interesting findings (Hmong in Minnesota! Russian in Oregon!). But this map conveys what’s probably a more important fact about languages in the US: they don’t vary as much by region as you might think. Just about everywhere, the second most spoken language is Spanish. There are exceptions — Louisiana and states near Quebec favor French, for example — but ultimately, the US is a English-speaking country which has had many waves of immigration from Spanish-speaking countries, meaning that most states have sizable first-generation immigrant populations that speak Spanish.

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14) New York tweets, by language

John Barratt, Ed Manley, James Chesire, and Oliver O’Brien

Obviously, the most common language for tweets originating from New York City is English; those tweets are represented in grey on the interactive map this screenshot is taken from. The more interesting data points are the other languages. Spanish is by far the most prevalent, with particular pockets in Queens, northern Manhattan, the Bronx, and Union City, NJ. Midtown Manhattan and JFK airport (the glowing area just a bit below the center of the image) have, understandably, the most linguistic diversity. And you can make out other enclaves: Russian in Brighton Beach, Portuguese in Astoria, etc. (Hat tip to Flowing Data.)

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English

15) The history of English

Sabio Lantz

While Germanic at root, English has evolved into a hybrid with components from ancient Celtic languages (such as a continous tense, or -ing verb tenses), considerable vocabulary borrowed from Latin and French, and lots of words stolen from Hindi, Arabic, and other languages of British colonies. This chart by Sabio Lantz is a clear, detailed chronology of that process.

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16) Where letters are used in English

David Taylor

The point that some letters are more commonly used to end words and others to begin them is pretty self-evident, but it’s cool nonetheless to see the letter-by-letter breakdown, which this chart by David Taylor provides.

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17) Which letters follow each other

David Taylor

By the same author as the above chart and using data from the Corpus of Historical American English at Brigham Young, this diagram delves deeper and shows the specific probability that a certain letter will follow a certain other letter in a word. The first column and first row are just a test of how frequently the letters in question are used to begin/end words. And naturally the Q/U relationship is quite strong.But I was surprised by how much V relies on E, and by the lack of a clear winner when it comes to starting words.

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18) Most common letter combos

Peter Norvig

”Our language,” Stephen Fry once noted, features “hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas … And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: ‘I love you,’ ‘Don’t go in there,’ ‘Get out,’ ‘You have no right to say that,’ ‘Stop it,’ ‘Why should I,’ ‘That hurt,’ ‘Help,’ ‘Marjorie is dead.’”

Google director of research Peter Norvig wasn’t able to confirm the ubiquity of “Marjorie is dead,” but he did reach some fascinating conclusions about the frequency of various words and character combinations in the Google Books archive. The chart of words is a bit dull (spoiler: “the” wins); more interesting, albeit less pretty, is this table he made of the most commonly searched character combinations for various character lengths. Note that this isn’t the same thing as searches by word length — word segments like “ation” do very well for themselves — but it’s often clear what words those segments are a part of (see “governmen” or “politica”).

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19) The rise and fall of the semicolon

Brett

In another clever use of the Google Ngram search engine, Wikipedian Brett searched for semicolon usage throughout the centuries; he found a jagged upward trend that peaked around 1800, followed by a long, smooth decline.

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American English

20) American dialects

Rick Aschmann

This chart of American dialects was put together by Rick Aschmann as a hobby, but the level of detail is extraordinary, and makes playing around with the larger, interactive version a must. The map itself is just the tip of the iceberg. Aschmann has a detailed table outlining the distinctions between the various dialects represented here, over 900 audio examples for them, and much, much more. What I found most surprising was the contiguity of the “Inland South” dialects, which goes from the southernmost tip of West Virginia all the way down to eastern New Mexico and much of Texas.

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21) Northern cities novel shift

Angr

Vowels sound different around the Great Lakes. Penn linguist William Labov started documenting the way short vowels were used in cities like Syracuse, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, and Chicago, and noticed that the way that, say, “block” was pronounced started to resemble the way the rest of the country says “black.” More than that, the changes caused a chain reaction. “Buses” started to sound more like “bosses.” To make the “o” sound that used to be part of “block,” you now used a “u” instead of an “o.” The map shows which areas have adopted various stages of that chained vowel shift. Here’s a more detailed explanation, and here are a number of examples of the shift in action.

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22) Coke v. pop v. soda

Joshua Katz

You knew this was coming. Perhaps the most famous map of language disparities within the US, this map by Joshua Katz (now of the New York Times) uses data from the Harvard Dialect Survey to show what people in different regions of the US use as a generic term for sugary, carbonated beverages. It’s a good reminder that while the US is linguistically cohesive compared to a lot of places, there are still revealing differences.

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23) Sunshowers

Joshua Katz

At least nearly all Americans have a term for soda (or coke or pop or whatever). The phenomenon this other map of Katz’s is about — it raining while the sun is out — doesn’t have a specific term associated with it in most of the US. In Minnesota, southern Florida, and parts of the Northeast, it’s referred to, benignly, as a “sunshower.” It gets weird in central Alabama and Mississippi, where “the devil is beating his wife” is apparently a thing people say, raising all kinds of theological questions in the process.

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Learn more

• 40 maps that explain World War II
• How a linguist reads a menu
• Map: Where Europeans speak English

Credits

Writer Dylan Matthews

Developer Yuri Victor

Editor Matthew Yglesias

Editor Melissa Bell

The Origins of Language by Boeree

 The Origins of Language

Dr. C. George Boeree

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It is an intriguing question, to which we may never have a complete answer:  How did we get from animal vocalization (barks, howls, calls...) to human language?

Animals often make use of signs, which point to what they represent, but they don't use symbols, which are arbitrary and conventional.  Examples of signs include sniffles as a sign of an on-coming cold, clouds as a sign of rain, or a scent as a sign of territory.  Symbols include things like the words we use.  Dog, Hund, chien, cane, perro -- these are symbols that refer to the creature so named, yet each one contains nothing in it that in anyway indicates that creature.

In addition, language is a system of symbols, with several levels of organization, at least phonetics (the sounds), syntax (the grammar), and semantics (the meanings).

So when did language begin?  At the very beginnings of the genus Homo, perhaps 4 or 5 million years ago?  Before that? Or with the advent of modern man, Cro-magnon, some 125,000 years ago?  Did the neanderthal speak?  We don't know.

There are many theories about the origins of language.  Many of these have traditional amusing names (invented by Max Müller and George Romanes a century ago), and I will create a couple more where needed.

1. The mama theory.  Language began with the easiest syllables attached to the most significant objects.

2.  The ta-ta theory.  Sir Richard Paget, influenced by Darwin, believed that body movement preceded language.  Language began as an unconscious vocal imitation of these movements -- like the way a child's mouth will move when they use scissors, or my tongue sticks out when I try to play the guitar.  This evolved into the popular idea that language may have derived from gestures.

3.  The bow-wow theory.  Language began as imitations of natural sounds -- moo, choo-choo, crash, clang, buzz, bang, meow...  This is more technically refered to as onomatopoeia or echoism.

4.  The pooh-pooh theory.  Language began with interjections, instinctive emotive cries such as oh! for surprise and ouch! for pain.

5.  The ding-dong theory.  Some people, including the famous linguist Max Muller, have pointed out that there is a rather mysterious correspondence between sounds and meanings.  Small, sharp, high things tend to have words with high front vowels in many languages, while big, round, low things tend to have round back vowels!  Compare itsy bitsy teeny weeny with moon, for example.  This is often referred to as sound symbolism.

6.  The yo-he-ho theory.  Language began as rhythmic chants, perhaps ultimately from the grunts of heavy work (heave-ho!).  The linguist A. S. Diamond suggests that these were perhaps calls for assistance or cooperation accompanied by appropriate gestures.  This may relate yo-he-ho to the ding-dong theory, as in such words as cut, break, crush, strike...

7.  The sing-song theory.  Danish linguist Jesperson suggested that language comes out of play, laughter, cooing, courtship, emotional mutterings and the like.  He even suggests that, contrary to other theories, perhaps some of our first words were actually long and musical, rather than the short grunts many assume we started with.

8.  The hey you! theory.  A linguist by the name of Revesz suggested that we have always needed interpersonal contact, and that language began as sounds to signal both identity (here I am!) and belonging (I'm with you!).  We may also cry out in fear, anger, or hurt (help me!).  This is more commonly called the contact theory.

9.  The hocus pocus theory.  My own contribution to these is the idea that language may have had some roots in a sort of magical or religious aspect of our ancestors' lives.  Perhaps we began by calling out to game animals with magical sounds, which became their names.

10.  The eureka! theory.  And finally, perhaps language was consciously invented.  Perhaps some ancestor had the idea of assigning arbitrary sounds to mean certain things.  Clearly, once the idea was had, it would catch on like wild-fire!

Another issue is how often language came into being (or was invented).  Perhaps it was invented once, by our earliest ancestors -- perhaps the first who had whatever genetic and physiological properties needed to make complex sounds and organize them into strings.  This is called monogenesis.  Or perhaps it was invented many times -- polygenesis -- by many people.

We can try to reconstruct earlier forms of language, but we can only go so far before cycles of change obliterate any possibility of reconstruction.  Many say we can only go back perhaps 10,000 years before the trail goes cold.  So perhaps we will simply never know.

Water Babies

It may help us understand the origins of languages if we take a look at what is sometimes called the Hardy-Morgan hypothesis, for the orijinator of the hypothesis - Alister Hardy, an English marine biologist, and Elaine Morgan, a Welsh writer and journalist. It is more commonly known as the aquatic ape theory.

Humans have quite a few characteristics we don't share with our primate relatives. We don't have much body hair; we have a layer of fat under our skin; we have a descended larynx; we produce tears; we sweat a lot; we tend to have sex face-to-fact; we can hold our breath quite easily; we are able to swim even before we walk; and most importantly, we walk on our two legs just about all the time.

Hardy, in the 1960s suggested that perhaps (he was cautious, and waited 30 years to tell anyone about his idea) we, or at least our genus, Homo, must have spent some portion of our existence on this planet in the water, wading, swimming, even diving. This may have been why we learned to stand up straight (while wading, supported by water), then evolving the strength and coordination to do so without the support, and only then proceeding into the savannah.

There are other animales that have some of our odd characteristics: sea mammals like whales and dolphins have little hair, hold their breath, and have extra fat under their skin; others, like otters, have a lot of hair, but share the other abilities with us. The only other land animal that shares our lack of hair is the elephant, whose closest relatives include dugongs and manatees. Perhaps elephants, too, spent a portion of their evolution in the water. They do still breath through their trunks when under water. (Gaeth et al 1999)

Perhaps our commonalities with these animals also extend to language.

Musical Babies

Darwin himself once said "Humans don't speak unless they are taught to do so", ie language is learned, and not innate in the way that the famous linguist Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, the author of "The Language Instinct" say.

Mario Vaneechoutte and his students suggest that language comes from music, with some assitance from gestures and dance. Music is what is innate, not language. Like in many species of birds and mammals, singing (which uptight scientists prefer to call "calls", in order to keep language as our "special ability" distinct) in order to call for help, keep track of each other, and - most especially - in order to attract mates. That use of sound is most definitely something that can evolve, from simple to the complex.

Babies like music. They love listening to their mothers speak to them. The mothers like to use a sort of sing-song speech ("motherese"), which babies like even more. Babies begin to vocalize in very "musical" ways, and often hum or sing in short or long "phrases", with modulations. Babies prefer major rather than minor intervals. And before they even learn individual words, they imitate the "melody of speech" (prosody). Even fetuses can remember sounds in the last trimester.

Because our larynx is lower in the throat, our tongues are free to move around inside the mouth more and our ability to hold our breath means we can control our exhaling and inhaling. We are born ready to make music and so speech. In fact, music and speech use the same areas of the brain, including Broca's area.

In regards to dancing, we see babies moving rhythmically while listening to music and even when not. We see the ease with which they can imitate the movements of others (perhaps by way of the famous "mirror neurons"?). And regarding gestures, maybe you have noticed the connection between movements of the body, especially the hands, and movements of the mouth, especially the tongue. I still stick out my tongue when I try to play guitar, and I have seen children make grinding movements of their mouths when using the old school pencil sharpeners.

A lot of the grammar that seems so essential when we look at written language, in speech is much more obvious: We use pauses, tone changes, melodies, rhythms, eye movements, facial expressions, and gestures that add information to our speech. Perhaps you (like myself) use the pauses we hear or imagine to guide our use of commas and periods. And perhaps you have noticed how much more difficult it is to understand someone when talking on the phone than when you are across the table from them.

In addition to the hypothesis that we were once "aquatic apes", Vaneechoutte adds that we were and still are very much "musical apes".

References

Chomsky. N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. Mouton, The Hague.

Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Concise Editon and Commentary by Carl Zimmer (2007), Plume, Penguin Books.

Gaeth, A.P., Short, R.V., & Renfree, M.B. (1999). The Developing Renal, Reproductive, and Respiratory Systems of the African Elephant Suggest an Aquatic Ancestry. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 96, 5555–5558.

Hardy, Alister Clavering (1977). "Was there a Homo aquaticus?". Zenith. 15 (1): 4–6.

Morgan, E. (1997). The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis - The Most Credible Theory of Human Evolution. London, UK: Souvenir Press.

Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: Morrow.

Vaneechoutte, M., & Skoyles, J.R. (1998). The Memetic Origin of Language: Humans as Musical Primates. J. Memetics, 2. Accessible at: http://users.ugent.be/~mvaneech/ORILA.FIN.html

Vaneechoutte, M. (2014). The Origin of Articulate Language Revisited: The Potential of a Semi-Aquatic Past of Human Ancetors to Explain the Orijin of Human Musicality and Articulate Language. Human Evolution, 29, 1-33.

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© Copyright 2003, C. George Boeree