ysabetwordsmith: (gold star)
ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2010-07-27 03:22 pm
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Map of India's Languages

This is so awesome.  I love this map of India's languages.  I'd love to see this done for the whole world.
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[identity profile] saffronrose.livejournal.com 2010-07-27 09:11 pm (UTC)(link)
A map of Spain's languages would also be neat! Lots of regional ones still kept alive.

[identity profile] judifilksign.livejournal.com 2010-07-28 12:13 am (UTC)(link)
What a neat site! I clicked around a lot of it. I had no idea that there were so many different languages spoken in India! I thought there were only two or three.

Well...

[identity profile] ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com 2010-07-28 12:38 am (UTC)(link)
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...

[identity profile] judifilksign.livejournal.com 2010-07-28 01:14 am (UTC)(link)
They aren't just dialects of a more widely spoken language either, huh? Pretty neat!

Re: Well...

[identity profile] ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com 2010-07-28 01:26 am (UTC)(link)
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.
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[identity profile] red-trillium.livejournal.com 2010-07-28 08:47 am (UTC)(link)
I knew there were different dialects but didn't realise how many! That is cool, thank you.

Re: Well...

[identity profile] judifilksign.livejournal.com 2010-07-28 03:48 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

Well...

[identity profile] ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com 2010-07-28 04:06 pm (UTC)(link)
Some may be dialects of each other, but many of these are completely separate languages. There are at least four language families so the diversity is extremely high.

Yes...

[identity profile] ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com 2010-07-28 05:41 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
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