Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

I just got my Country Codes of the World map in the mail from John Yunker at Byte Level Research. It puts scaled country domains onto a map of the world. Quite interesting to look at―a few things that stood out for me:

• Australia is so much dinkier than I thought.
• Everybody knows that China is huge, but India is more or less equally huge.
• There are some surprises: Golly, Bangladesh.

Looking at the map got me thinking about possibilities for mapping languages: there are a lot more languages out there than country domains, but, with widespread GPS-enabled cell phones becoming ubiquitous this kind of research seems poised to explode.

The interface is easy to picture: you go to a URL on your cell phone and it says “What language(s) do you use?” The application then map those results onto a map. Simple.

This would deal with a pet peeve of mine regarding most linguistic mapping: it’s really hard to get current information on who speaks what where. In my own country, the US, you will often see language maps that would lead one to believe that the eastern seaboard is flowing with speakers of Algonquian languages.

Now, the fact that Algonquian and so many other historical languages are no longer flourishing here is something I mourn, but it’s also a fact. There are certainly more Mandarin speakers in Massachusetts than there are speakers of Massachusett. It’s just the state of languages in our world.

But we still don’t have enough detail about that state. It will be very interesting to see, when we do. (In the case of the US, I would hope that such an application could thoroughly deep-six the notion that this country is “monolingual,” an absurd myth.)

Even without the use of GPS, you can run informal mapping “experiments” already: here’s one I did on a neat new site called Ask500People:

Do you hear more than one language when you walk around where you live?