Map of India's Languages

[ysabetwordsmith]

This is so awesome.  I love this map of India's languages.  I'd love to see this done for the whole world.

Comments

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

There are several hundred languages spoken in India. A handful or two are spoken widely; many more have local significance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers_in_India

Re: Well...

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

They aren't just dialects of a more widely spoken language either, huh? Pretty neat!

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Some of them are probably close relatives, both of common languages or other uncommon ones. But there are at least four language families spoken: Indo-European, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, and Tibeto-Burman. Some languages haven't been classified yet. India is one of the places with extreme language diversity. *sigh* For now, anyway.

Re: Well...

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing all those Himalayan Mountains did a lot for geographical isolation in the past few thousand years, making dialects and linguistic variations for those valleys and peaks and so on.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

That's it exactly. It was hard for people to travel, which made it easy for languages to exist in close proximity without mingling. Another place with extreme linguistic density is Aotearoa / New Zealand.