Linguistic map of Europe and current borders [1248 x 1701] [x-post r/mapporn]
![Linguistic map of Europe and current borders [1248 x 1701] [x-post r/mapporn]](/api/ImgurImages?id=uSO6NPJ.png)
Posted Jun 14, 2014, 10:55 PM UTC
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16
People definitely still speak Occitan in the south of France.
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That was one glaring omission I saw too.
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No Jèrriais either, my granddad still speaks it.
edit: although to be fair there are only about 5000 speakers.
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And if this were 20 years from now, Alsatian would be gone. Only 3% of children speak it, though half of all adults do.
This is already the case in Lorraine, where the frequency of German speaking is low enough so as to be insignificant by now.
But I must say...Luxembourgish is DEAD ON.
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As someone who as lived the first 25 years of my life in southern France, I've never met a single Occitan speaker. Where are you from?
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The US. From what I hear, it's only spoken by old people in private. It's not unlikely that the language will end up dead in our lifetimes.
And to be fair, the only person I know who knows Occitan can only understand it, not speak it.
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Some people still are able to would be more correct, to the best of my knowledge. I studied in Paris and went to the south of france every summer for a few years, but who knows? Maybe i have missed something this big.
Honestly doubt it though.
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Maybe. It might be like in Arerland in Belgium with Luxembourgish where it's a big everyday language, though you would probably only see French with any regularity.
But you're probably right
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From what I've heard, it's mostly spoken in the home, especially in rural areas. You probably wouldn't encounter it in public. But I don't have any firsthand experience with it, so who knows.
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It is definitely a minority language, practically everyone speaks French too, and predominantly. But there's been somewhat of a resurgence in learning Occitan in the wake of globalization (parallel to the somewhat bizarre hyper-localization trend you see in Celtic language learning nowadays). The biggest area for that is Provence, and my biggest exposure to it was in the Bouches-du-Rhône. Arles actually has a statue to Frédéric Mistral in one of the main places.
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Yes, that is true. I believe there was a band called massilia sound system, that only sung in occitan, which resulted from what you are saying. But that does not make it a majority language. Hell, arab is definitely more widely spoken in the south of france.
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Some commenters are casting doubt on this map for overrepresenting certain national or cultural languages (like Irish in Ireland or Belarusian in Belarus), and I'd just like to point out that the Faroese one is correct. Although we use more and more foreign words, we are still very dominantly speaking Faroese in the Faroe Islands.
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Albanian is actually quite good as well. Obviously some of those places don't only speak Albanian, but this is by far one of the best maps I've seen that shows the actual distribution of the language in places like Macedonia and Greece
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So you consider Albanian to be the main language in a few areas of Greece? Even of the pelopponese?
Sorry, but this map is definitely overrepresenting minority languages.
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Significant areas of southern Greece traditionally spoke Arvanitika, an Albanian dialect. But I seriously doubt there is a majority in any geographical area today.
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Arvanitika is still spoken in those communities, as far as I know.
Take my comments in the context of what I say any time I comment on a language map: They're all ultimately crap and lack any nuance when showing language distributions. It's not a black and white thing.
That said, Albanian is quite good, compared to almost any other Europe language map I've seen
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It's not very accurate in regards to the Celtic languages - every one of them is endangered with a low number of every-day speakers. In Ireland, for example, more people speak Polish and Chinese at home than Irish and the vast majority of the population primarily speaks English.
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Welsh isn't endangered, but it is too generous in the south.
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Welsh is definitely in the trouble zone, though it is healthier than Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Breton.
1
Can I just say, they mislabeled a language in Italy. In the Northeast, there are two: Friulian and Ladin, which are related to Romansh but aren't the same. It should be called Rhaeto-Romance, if anything. Besides, Friulian has more speakers than the other two.
Also the one for Italian doesn't include any of the other languages spoken.
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Russia would look so very different if other minor languages were included. Quite a few minor languages could be added. For example, there's ~900,000 people speaking the Permic languages.
Also, why are Finnish (with two n's!), Karelian and Veps added together with Mordvinic and Mari? The first three are indeed very close, they could even have Estonian in the bunch because that's very close to them, too. But Mordvinic and Mari are very very different from the Baltic Finnish languages... That's like lumping Icelandic and German together.
Funny, really. Swedish and Norwegian are separate, Estonian and Finnish are separate, Finnish and Mari are together. Wut? They're not mutually intelligible, not even the slightest bit!
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What's the little pink dot inside Germany?
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Frisian.
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And any idea what the brown areas are on the Poland/Belarus border and nearby? Looks like Turkic or possibly Celtic by the colour.
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I presume the Lipka Tatars.
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Where is it that they speak Frisian in Germany?
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In western Lower Saxony and north-western Schleswig-Holstein.
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6m Gypsies have gone missing of your map. Hitler had a go at them, France has to, but ignoring them doesn't make them disappear.
http://www.ethnologue.com/language/RMY
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I don't understand why people are down-voting you. Most of the gipsies in countries like Slovakia speak their own language (not quite sure whether it is Romani or some dialect). You can even hear it on the streets and there are villages where it is the main language. I would not consider to be a language minority to be ignored.
It might be difficult to map though, as it would be scattered in form of dots or patches over multiple countries.
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It is in the Indo-European language group and has been in Europe for 800 years or so, at least as long as other languages. It could be overlaid on the map with sized wheels like this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Roma_in_Europe_2007_cropped.png
Ok, I get it people don't like them but ignoring them is just plain racism.
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They hardly are a majority anywhere though. Also, the nomad aspect doesn t help.
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There are so many other minority languages that are displayed in the map even if it doesn't make any sense. Like that dot in eastern Finland that I guess must mean Tatar, even though there are a total of 700 ethnic Tatars living in Finland currently (source in Finnish). But it's a historical minority language in Finland, so they've included it.
Anyway, I think my main conclusion is that this is a bad map, not that some minority language should or shouldn't be included in it.
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Can't you read? Your link gives a total of 484,780 speakers, not 6M.
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His link only refers to Vlax Romany, which is only one dialect group of the [Romany language(s)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_language) (which have a total population of speakers of 3 mil.).
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Number of people missing, ignored = 6m
Number of speakers in your country = see this table
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6m Gypsies have gone missing of your map.
No they haven't. Roma hardly make up a majority anywhere (at least officially, because many don't self-declare as Roma in censuses). Plus, it's quite common for Roma to not speak Romany (in Romania, only about half of Roma speak their native language).
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How come nothing's done to show multilingual areas?
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There is not one place in Poland where Polish is not a majority language. And there is no language named "Masurian".
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Are they really calling the Sami languages LAPP?
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Swiss reporting in: It appears to be relatively accurate, however the German spot in the southern region of Ticino shouldn't be there - as far as I know it is 100% Italian. Interesting map though, must have been a lot of work going into this.
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That's if you can call Swiss German German.
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I'm guessing that many linguists (I'm not one myself) would put it as a separate language - however that hasn't been the policy in Switzerland and it's just being called a dialect here. If this is the official position, then I don't think this map's maker can be faulted.
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I'd actually put it as a dialect but it's also in that awkward region in between dialect and language.
But the official position doesn't matter. Otherwise we wouldn't classify the Chinese languages as different languages.
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Would it change your classification if the language was written and had a standardised grammar? Or is there some official metric for the distance between dialects / related languages in terms of vowel / consonant shifts, maybe vocabulary and grammar, that could bring a clear classification?
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Wacky borders.
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The borders of Catalan are quite wrong...
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I have some doubts about several regions but Latvia is very inaccurate.
What data is this from?
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I'm sure they don't exclusively speak German in Alsace-Lorraine or Breton in Brittany, although the map indicates that.
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Never ceases to blow my mind that Basque is a language isolate.
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There are some Polish and German speakers in the Czech borderlands but they don't make majority of the population in these areas. But the map looks like there is a majority of those speakers.
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Compare this present map with this one, a century ago: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_linguistic_map_1907.JPG
Awazing what you can achieve with barbed wire, mass expulsions and forced schooling in the national language.
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Malta is in Africa and Cyprus is in Asia too.
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That is beyond generous with the amount of space it gives to Irish.
*every single minority language on the map
True. I had a look at the original post and the comments are full of complaints about the boundaries.
The ones I think are greatly exagerated are Dutch in northern France, Breton in Bretagne, and the Celtic languages on the British isles. Not too sure about the rest.
It was way, way, way too generous with Basque and painting the Balearic Islands as Catalan-speaking is pretty generous too.
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Same with Belarusian and probably German in Transylvania.
German in France too. Sure, some people in Alsace and Lorraine can speak a German dialect (and many speak standard German as a second language) but at least in the parts I've visited, French is the most common.
Alsatian is France's largest regional language. Still, it's still a minority.
The worse is with Catalan.
Look at this map : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Catalonia
French Catalonia is very small compared to the catalan-speaking zone they put on the map. I guess even Montpellier, a absolutly non-catalan city speak catalan for them.
The people that speak belarusian, do they speak it with alot of russian words or without much russian influence.
I lived in Belarus. Basically Belarusian is used in the public transport systems (announcements, "next stop", etc), and other similar government areas. Some smaller cities or villages speak Belarusian, but it's typically rather pure Belarusian.
Most kids learn it in school, so they understand it, and when they speak it, some Russian can find its way in as a result of not knowing Belarusian to the highest level, but I wouldn't count them as "Belarusian speakers" in the same manner that taking French 1101 doesn't make one a "French speaker"
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And poor little Slovak disappears among its minority languages. There might be villages out east where Ruthenian/Ukrainian is thriving, but Slovak is the main language. Hungarian is quite prevalent in certain parts of the south, but seems to be getting too much room on the map. I don't have a clue what that big splotch of German is doing there.
I did like how Slovak was represented in southern Moravia. Not the prevalent language in the region, but there is a decent amount of speakers there
I would say the same with Ukrainian. I thought it was the Russian language, culture, military that was spilling over the border and not the other way around.