Words on a Map: The Cartography of Language

With possibly as many as 7,000 languages used around the world, it was only a matter of time before some of them would make it onto a map. Language maps, linguistic maps, or – if the map shows ethnic information as well – ethnolinguistic maps are a type of thematic map: a map which displays the spatial distribution of data about a particular subject. As color is frequently used to distinguish between languages, linguistic maps are a visually appealing genre of cartography.

What considerations go into mapping human languages? The first and most obvious question has to be, “what’s a language?” While that question is beyond the scope of this blog post, it’s worth mentioning that the distinction between a fully-fledged “language” and a mere “dialect” is not nearly as cut-and-dried as is commonly thought. A language, famously, is “a dialect with an army and navy,” in a quote usually attributed to scholar of Yiddish linguistics Max Weinreich, or a person who attended one of his lectures (in the original Yiddish, “a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot”). The decision to label a speech variety as either a “language” or a “dialect” is fraught with political, historical, and cultural complications. Whether, for example, “Chinese” is labeled as one language (with many dialects) or as many distinct languages varies depending on who made the map, when, and why.

While political maps typically represent international borders with thick, defined lines (and disputed areas in dashed lines stand out as exceptions), the boundaries between languages are much more fluid. Linguistic areas may not conform to national borders, and people – or whole communities – can be multilingual. How do you account for this on a map?

In this ethnolinguistic map of the Middle East, areas of boxy stripes indicate overlap between language areas:

Meanwhile, large areas of the map of Nigeria below are simply labeled “Mixed;” no dominant language is identified. This reflects the widespread multilingualism in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the presence of many smaller languages not represented on the map.

Perhaps the earliest map in our collections showing the geographic spread of languages is this 1741 map by German comparative linguist Gottfried Hensel, originally published as part of his book Synopsis Universae Philologiae. In his map, the world is divided into four plates and each area of the world decorated with the first line of the Christian Lord’s Prayer in the relevant language and script. In some cases, Hensel was working from second- or third-hand information, and his translations run the gamut from quite accurate to entirely fanciful.

The linguistic maps in the Geography and Map Division are diverse, but most of them date to the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Some, similar to Hensel’s map above, give a broad overview of the world’s languages. In the late 19th-century German map below, they’re color-coded by language family, according to contemporary theories of language relationships.

Other maps show the distribution of languages in a particular area, language family, or time period. This 1883 map, published along with a book, Modern Languages of Africa, shows African languages from several families:

The historical distribution of Mayan languages is depicted in this map from the World Digital Library:

Another map shows the staggering diversity of indigenous languages in North America:

Language maps may be created for many purposes, from academic study to intellectual curiosity to international relations. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has published a wide variety of linguistic maps, several of which are in the Geography and Map Division’s collections.

A very practical map, the map at right was produced by the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Information during World War II. The languages represented are those spoken by U.S. government interpreters in Japan, Korea, Manchuria, and northeastern China.

Colorful, relevant, and more complex than they might appear, linguistic maps are a visual exploration of the world’s diversity. Explore more language maps in the Geography and Map Division collections.