Real language boundaries aren't that sharp, but I generalized them for the map.

This is an interactive globe I've been building. Two things are encoded at once: each admin region is colored by its plurality language (the single most-spoken one there), and the height of the region is proportional to its population density — so dense areas rise up as ridges and empty ones stay flat.

You can drag to rotate and scroll to zoom. Hover or click any region (or any chip in the legend) to isolate a language: everything else dims, and it shows native + total speaker counts. You can select several at once to see combined totals, and save combinations.

The feature I had the most fun with is the second-language "glow." When you select a language that is a lingua franca, regions where it's not the plurality language but is a widespread second language light up in a dim tint.

It's Three.js + D3 (vibe-coded), with admin-1 boundaries from open topojson data. Language assignments are hand-curated, and population density comes from mixed public sources. Also, where population density for a specific region could not be found, the country's average pop density was used, so if you notice some weird one that is why. I also couldn't find language use by specific admin region for many countries in sub-saharan Africa, so for many of those the national language (or plurality language for the whole country) is used.

Caveats: It's strictly one language per region, so minority languages inside a region disappear. Closely related language varieties are deliberately merged (like Hindi/Urdu, Farsi/Dari/Tajik, etc. The second-language zones pretty coarse approximations. This is definitely a work in progress - in the near future I'm planning on making the underlying data (and sources) more transparent. I'm also open to feedback/suggestions!

Only languages whose speakers represent more than 5% of the population in their respective municipalities/subdivisions are shown. If the proportion is more than 25% then the language is shown as solid colour. (This is why Waurá is shown, but not Apurinã for example, and Garifuna's territory seems a bit smaller than before)

This map prioritises concentration of speakers, rather than raw number of speakers.

Hi everyone!

This isn't a map as you may have guesses however like most of you here, I’m obsessed with maps and geography. I wanted to create a daily challenge that tests your knowledge of why a place is where it is, not just what it looks like on a map.

I ended up building GuessTopia. It's a daily geography game, but instead of just guessing based on a map shape, you have to use attributes like Climate, Languages and Population to narrow it down.

I've been working on it as a solo project in my spare time and I'm really trying to get the some feedback. It has a Country mode, a City mode a Capital mode.

I'd love to hear what the Linguistic maps ​community thinks.

Check it out here: https://guesstopia.com

(Totally free, just a hobby project I'm proud of)

Definitely an areal (phonotactics) feature for Czech-Slovak-Hungarian-BCMS. In the past for Finnish-(Old) Estonian-Latvian as well.

Edit 1: Lithuanian has (prescriptively) also long unstressed syllables, though the stress is not fixed on any syllable.

Edit 2: The maps has an areal focus for languages with a phonemic distinction about long and short unstressed vowels (i.e. minimal pairs like Finnish kauna vs. kaunaa, Latvian Rīga vs. Rīgā, Czech potřebuji vs. potřebují, Hungarian haza vs. hazá, BCMS žène vs. žènē).

Edit 3: Apart from Lithuanian, also Modern Irish and Standard Arabic do show long unstressed vowels, the difference being with the aforementioned languages that they diachronically show the tendency to move away from a quantitative phonemic distinction towards a qualitative one, meaning the minimal pair is kept, but the long vowels get reduced and the vowels' quality becomes distinctive, cf. Lithuanian lygus [ˈlʲiːɡʊs] vs. lygūs [ˈlʲiːɡuːs] (prescriptive) > [ˈlʲiːɡus] (colloquial). For Arabic it becomes clear when comparing the vowels diachronically between MSA and i.e. Maghrebi.