We use written language to record the things we think are important -- memories, sacred texts, poems, legal documents.... When an alphabet falls out of use (due to conquest, political edict, demographic shift, or anything else), a people's collective memories are at risk of dissipating. This article looks at the effort to save not just endangered languages but endangered alphabets:
"By the most widely-quoted estimate, the world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, as many as half of which will be extinct by the end of this century. An even more dramatic sign of the rate at which the world’s cultural diversity is shrinking involves the alphabets in which those languages are written. Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in perhaps 140 scripts. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered – they’re no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, never seen on television, in many cases incompatible with computer keyboards, understood only by a few elders, or used by only a handful of priests or monks. ... The Endangered Alphabets team has partnered with preservation and revival groups in a dozen countries to create tangible items such as endangered alphabet rubber stamps so kids can have fun; packs of playing cards in alphabets from Bulgaria to Bangladesh; an endangered alphabet board game that is a cross between Cluedo and The Name of the Rose; colouring books; writers’ journals; illustrated children’s books based on folk tales gathered and retold by the children themselves; word search puzzles; and what I believe may be the world’s first six-language children’s picturebook dictionary for indigenous schoolchildren in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. ... My current project is to create a digital world atlas of endangered alphabets, with pins corresponding to the locations of cultures with endangered scripts." geographical.co.uk/opinion/item/2923-endangered-alphabets
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For those who remember the play Pygmalion (or the musical version My Fair Lady), Henry Higgins is a professor of phonetics who can identify a person's formative geography by the way s/he pronounces words. This map looks at the range of local pronunciations of "scone" in the UK and Ireland: does it rhyme with "cone" or "gone"? brilliantmaps.com/scone-map/#more-3898
The ability to recognize other languages/alphabets often comes in handy in identifying place names, understanding historical relationships between countries, and otherwise interpreting geographic information. This thoughtfully designed 60-question quiz combines a written phrase (typically a proverb) in a given language with a photo of a place that language is spoken. passport.topix.com/quiz/19816
Today is Bastille Day, and French is one of the fastest-growing languages on the planet. But the most populous French-speaking country is no longer France: it's the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This map shows where French is the official language (dark blue) or an official language (light blue).
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Countries_where_French_is_an_official_language.svg/525px-Countries_where_French_is_an_official_language.svg.png Since the subsections of what is today Cameroon merged following their independence from Britain and France in the early 1960s, the country has been officially bilingual. But the geographically smaller, less populous English-speaking part of the country has burbled with talk of secession on and off for decades, most recently re-emerging in late 2016 and escalating over the last nine months. This map shows the French-speaking regions of Cameroon in light blue and the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon in light red. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Langues_du_Cameroun_Carte.png/450px-Langues_du_Cameroun_Carte.png
This geo-graphic shows the world's major languages, represented proportionally by number of native speakers, with the countries in which those languages are spoken also shown proportionally. www.lucasinfografia.com/Mother-tongues
The U.S. has now been militarily engaged in Afghanistan for more than 16 years, but most Americans don't know a whole lot about the people of Afghanistan. This map, created by the U.S. Army in September 2001, shows Afghanistan's assumed ethnic geography at the beginning of the war. (Over the last 16 years, though, Afghanistan has created more refugees than any country except Syria, which has undoubtedly changed the substance of this map. Afghanistan's 2013 census pointedly did not ask questions about language or ethnicity.)
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/US_Army_ethnolinguistic_map_of_Afghanistan_--_circa_2001-09.jpg This map from the Library of Congress shows "judicially established Indian land areas" as of 1978, the year the Indian Claims Commission expired. The commission was created after WWII to thank Native Americans for their service during the war. Native peoples did not regain any lands lost over the prior three centuries, but the U.S. government did provide a monetary settlement based on this map. tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd370:g3701:g3701e:ct008649/full/pct:12.5/0/default.jpg
Today is the anniversary of the armistice ending World War I. As part of the agreement ending the war, Germany lost its colonies in Africa and Micronesia and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were broken up. This map shows the ethno-linguistic composition of Austro-Hungary before the war began. cdn0.vox-cdn.com/assets/4620799/austria_hungary.png
Students in my "Your Future World" class discover there's more linguistic diversity within India than in all of Europe. (According to the most recent government data, India has 29 different languages with 1 million or more native speakers, 60 languages with 100,000 or more native speakers, and 122 languages with at least 10,000 native speakers.) This map captures India's major language geography. defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/percent-of-people-speaking-primary-languages-in-india.79131/
The Caucasus, the mountainous region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea that bridges Europe and Asia, has long been the frontier of empires, from the Assyrian to the Persian to the Mongol to the Ottoman to the Russian, with a sprinkling of indigenous kingdoms throughout. The region's complicated past has made the Caucasus one of the most linguistically diverse places on the planet, as shown on this map. 4.bp.blogspot.com/-fgHPr4ylKT8/T9D96BKdc5I/AAAAAAAAE38/lkrPRFqIuOs/s1600/CaucasusLayout_rev.png
Despite long involvement in the Middle East, Americans tend to have a weak understanding of the region's complex interplay of languages and ethnicities. This map shows the language geography of Iran. (The unlabeled white areas are Iran's major deserts.) Only slightly more than half of Iranians speak Persian, the official language, as their first language (if at all). qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-50ea7de29c5fd7409ea441768b365d6d?convert_to_webp=true
This map of NYC details which languages -- other than English or other than English and Spanish, depending on your setting -- predominate in which neighborhoods. Mousing over the map allows users to distinguish between languages coded with similar colors (e.g., Yiddish and Tagalog). http://www.jillhubley.com/project/nyclanguages/
It is easy to forget that what we call another country, in English, is often not what it calls itself. This map shows the countries of Europe labeled with their names in their own languages. scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/14199248_1223590284351384_1762268652619927771_n.jpg?oh=7666d3ca8a07d5cb0300d88d9b9f997b&oe=5845616A
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