Dr. Stephen Huffman has produced a series of language maps that show the distribution of the world's nearly 7000 ethno-linguistic peoples. The maps show, through colored poloygons, the geographic extent of language homelands. I never realized that there were so many languages and it is very interesting to see how the world is divided into areas of homogeneity (such as the United States) and extreme diversity (such as areas in Africa and Asia).
The maps are important works for the field of language study but they are also important examples of great cartography distributed via the web. In addition to display maps, ArcMap Project files, pdf documents and other GIS data can be downloaded from the site.
Image by Dr. Stephen HuffmanRead more about the
World Language Maps at gmi.org.
# posted by MapWatch @ Saturday, April 01, 2006
