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map love + linguistics geekery =

My academic background is in linguistics, as you may or may not know, even if you've been reading this blog for a while. I try not to go off into the linguistic deep end too often. But I'm making an exception in this case, because (1) this is actually useful in research terms (2) it's plain fun.

As an academic my areas of specialization were language variation, sociolinguistics, and language and discrimination, which means I dealt a lot with different aspects of what used to be called dialectology. Which means I'm happy with the fact that the MLA has conjured up a great way to look at the distribution of languages over space. You can pick a language (say, Armenian or Hopi) and look at where it is spoken in the whole US, or in a particular state or county. For people harboring the misconception that the US is a monolingual country, this will make clear how mistaken that idea is. The US is not, has never been, monolingual. Monolingualism is in fact an oddity in the world. What's spoken in France? French, yes, but also Catalan, Basque, Breton and a handful of other indiginous languages -- not to mention the languages of immigrant populations. After you've had a gander at the MLA map and played with it, you can go over to Ethnologue and look up any country to see how many different languages are spoken there.

Having indulged my inner geek, I will now closet it away for a few months at least.

Thanks to LanguageHat for the headsup on the MLA map.

June 24, 2004 12:02 PM

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