I started sweeping the web a few years ago in the quest for language maps. Back then, I thought that this was the way to do language geography; I also thought there were a tons of maps lying around and my job was to just collect them in one place. As it turned out, I was completely misguided, rather quite uninformed. Östen Dahl introduced me to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and also to a new approach to language mapping (read more about it under our language map server). I will keep maintaining the links to various image-based maps below for some time to come but generally, it is safe to say that they will soon be as good as obsolete. My time and efforts these days go mostly to the development of our language map server.

LANGUAGE FAMILY MAPS WORLD AFRICA EURASIA Europe Caucasus Middle East South Asia South East Asia OCEANIA AUSTRALIA NORTH AMERICA SOUTH AMERICA	TYPOLOGICAL & AREALLY-ORIENTED MAPS World Atlas of Language Structures Maps by Matthew Dryer Linguistic areas (this section is yet to grow as I produce maps of some well known Sprachbundt-s) Maps of suppletion and related phenomena LANGUAGE COORDINATES  POLITICAL & PHYSICAL MAPS MAP CREATION SITES HISTORICAL MAPS SOME GEOGRAPHY PROJECTS

Page Last Updated
2008-11-04

• LANGUAGE FAMILY MAPS

Some maps show in separate windows.
WORLD
• Linguistic families around the globe by Mark Rosenfelder
A collection of language families maps
• Language Famillies of the World by Dr. C. George Boeree, Shippensburg University.   (I do not necessarily agree with the classification adopted here; especially not with the part where a Caucasian family is discussed. But the maps are generally informative)
. Shows up in a separate window.
• World Map Interactive Digital Atlas
AFRICA
• A Simplified Linguistic Map of Africa
• Africa: Linguistic Phyla by Michael Cysouw. A backup copy is used here as the original was moved somewhere.
• Africa: atlas
• The Languages of Benin, Original source Carte Linguistique du Bénin / CENALA/ 1989. Reproduced on the web by Jean Houndagba, Guillaume Motcho and Adi Mama.
• Some isogloss maps over the Bantu speaking area provided by the Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary (CBOLD) Project at UC Berkeley
EURASIA
Europe (some general maps)
• Map of the Language Families of Europe by Matthew Dryer (small version)
• Map of the Language Families of Europe by Matthew Dryer (large version)
• Map of Subfamilies of Indo-European in Europe by Matthew Dryer

Western Europe

• Atlas linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne (thanks to Mikael Parkvall for the link)
• Language map of Belgium
• Language map of Friesland
• A Map and other info on Veneto, a Western Romance language from the Gallo-Italian group; very different from standard Italian
• Sardinian dialects by Guido Mensch. I am using a backup copy here as the original vanished.
• Some isogloss maps of Galician dialects
• Language Map of Ancient Italy

Central and Eastern Europe

• Isogloss maps of translators false friends in Slavic Languages Thanks a lot to Mikael Parkvall for the original link. This was started as a personal project by Daniel Buncic, lecturer of Slavonic linguistics at Bonn University. It has become an Wikipedia article. Follow the link semasiological maps to view the maps.
• Interactive map of the Turkic Languages (via the Titus project)

The Caucasus Region

• Map of Language Families in Caucasus Region by Matthew Dryer
• Ethno-linguistic map of the languages of the Caucasus region (from the University of Texas map collection)
• The Languages of Tajikistan by Iraj Bashiri. I am using a backup copy here.

The Middle East

• Linguistic map of the Middle East
(The map was originally found at Standford but they moved the link. I am using a backup copy here.)
• Semitic languages: map of their geographical distribution in their original homelands
• A Map of Old Iranian languages

South Asia

• India (the web page titles were used here)
• Linguistic Map of India. The map is originally from askAsia.org. However, they keep moving it which results in a constantly broken link; so I am using a backup copy here.
• Languages of India The original was moved somewhere so I am using a backup copy here.

South East Asia

• Chinese Linguistic Groups
(from the map collection of UT Austin)
OCEANIA
• Language distribution in Oceania. Language maps of Australia, Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, New Zealand, and if you are patient enough to scroll all the way down, you'll be able to see language claims for Antarctica.
AUSTRALIA
• Maps showing the State of the Indigenous Languages of Australia, 1996 Census. Sent to me by Nick Thieberger.
• Spread of Speakers of Indigenous Languages of Australia
• Proportion of Indigenous People who Spoke an Indigenous Language or Creole
• Maps showing the distribution of speakers of the following languages: Yakuntjatjara, Yindjibarndi, Tiwi, and Yanyuwa
• Population of speakers of Australian indigenous languages, marked by territories on the Tindale map
NORTH AMERICA
• The Native languages of the North pacific area a very nice map showing the distribution of language families in Eastern Siberia and the North West of the American continent (scroll down the page to see the map).
• A Collection of maps of Native American precontact cultures and languages
• Linguistic Distribution of American Indians as of 1896
• Map of Language Families of continental U.S. by Matthew Dryer (small version)
• Map of Language Families of continental U.S. by Matthew Dryer (large version)
• Map of Language Families of Pacific Northwest by Matthew Dryer
• First Nations of British Columbia. (scroll down the page to get to the map)
• Native Languages of Alaska from Alaska Native Language Center Web site
• Yukon's First Nation Languages
• The Hopi Indians
• Language Map of the Kawaiisu and their neighbors
• Linguistic Map of Oaxaca at the Time of the Spanish Conquest
SOUTH AMERICA
• Amazonian languages

Typological Maps

• World Atlas of Language Structures
• Maps by Matthew Dryer. Shows up in a separate window.
• Linguistic areas
  • Macro-linguistic areas as defined by Dryer 1992. I am putting only the image here, ask me for the shape files if you need them. A larger copy of the image is here.
• Maps of suppletion and related phenomena . Some of the maps below (the ones on tense-aspect, verbal number and ordinal numerals) appear in WALS but the ones on imperatives and copula verbs don't. I wanted them all in the same style which is why I am reproducing the WALS maps below.
  • Suppletion according to tense and aspect (small). Click here for a larger version.
  • Suppletion according to imperative (small). Click here for a larger version.
  • Regular and irregular copulas in the WALS sample (small). Click here for a larger version
  • Verbal number and suppletion (small) Click here for a larger version
  • Suppletion and derivation of ordinal numerals (with Thomas Stolz) (small). Click here for a larger version.

LANGUAGE COORDINATES


• Language locations. This is an extended version of Matthew Dryer's database of language locations
• Wikipedia: Obtaining Geographic Coordinates. A nice listing of sites where geographical coordinates in general can be obtained.
  
• The files below contain geographical coordinates of locations where specific languages are spoken. Those are languages I have used in my typological work. The locations were taken either from the Ethonologue or the grammar of the language in question. Location coordinates come the GeoNet Nameservers: Geonet for non-US place names and Geonet for US place names. The languages listed count around 180. Some of them are listed with more than one location as I wasn't sure which of all listed locations would be the principal one. All feedback about possible mistakes is very welcome.
  • Language coordinates in plain US ASCII
  • Language coordinates formatted for use by MacGPS Pro
  • Language coordinates formatted for plotting maps with Versamap for Windows.

   

• POLITICAL AND PHYSICAL MAPS
• Online maps from UT Austin Ready made maps - can be viewed online or downloaded.
• Geonet name server Gives geographic info such as coordinates, location, kind etc for settlements of various sizes and likewise other geographical entities. Datasets can be downloaded free of charges.
• Digital Topographic Mapsets. A nice (and apparently growing) collection of topographic maps from UC Berkeley. Thanks to Oesten Dahl for the link and also for showing me how to use them for the creation of linguistic maps.
• Digital chart of the world. from Penn State University Library. Maps of individual countries can be generated online or downloaded in ArcView, GIF or postscript format. Can be a little slow especially if more than 2 layers are selected for drawing.
• AskAsia Map & Timeline Library (nice political maps; why Australia is included remains a mystery to me)
• MAP CREATION SITES
• Map Machine from National Geographic (can be a bit slow when loading).
• Online map creation
. Not a very impressive map server but following the links leads to others links with useful info about map making.
• HISTORICAL MAPS
• Historical Maps. The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. The University of Texas at Austin
• 16-20 Century Maps of Africa. The library of Northwestern University presents 113 digital copies of antique maps of Africa.

 
• SOME GEOGRAPHY PROJECTS
• GIS in Linguistics