The global spread of the Indo-european language family
Huh no one in Alice Springs speaks English?
That’s a very uh … unique way to map Australia.
Sounds right to me
How is no one in 1950 native to European languages in africa besides south africa?
I’m guessing, it doesn’t list the colonizers there, because in terms of numbers, they’re irrelevant…
Yes, let’s ignore the whole of the Americas and Australia.
Lots of people in African ex colonies are native speakers of Portuguese and French. I presume this was already the case in 1950.
Then I guess, I was guessing wrong? I’m not trying to claim anything and I did specify “there”, because I did notice the Americas and Australia. I assumed, the definition of “native speaker” was maybe a bit special here…
It’s confusing specially because it highlights south africa but nothing else.
My thinking was that South Africa might have had more immigrants from Europe and such than e.g. Congo. At least, I believe, South Africa is particularly known for having many white folks there. But yeah, I’m also just spitballing…
There are too many French-speaking people in Africa, even as a second language, to ignore in this map. French being maybe an unofficial, but definitely shared language among different regions and nations across most of the continent. For example, how someone from Nigeria would communicate with someone from Cameroon.
Is that strip across Russia simply the populated parts of Russia? Presumably, the North is too cold for much more than a few secluded villages…
For a moment, I thought, that might be a remnant of the Silk Road, but that was quite a bit further south…
Modern silk road, called trans-siberian railway, the railroad through Russia. Factories and cities were built next to the railroad. A lot of other nations live in russia, but they are not indo-europeans, and much smaller in numbers.
There are 25 regional official languages in russia, only 2 of them indo-european: Osetian and Ukrainian. Most others are Turkic and Uralic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Russia
Also this map is shitty, as it doesn’t show what percentage of people speak the language, 51% looks the same as 99%.
Time to go research those gaps in Europe
The small gap in Northern Spain are Basques, other gaps are the Ural guys, Finno-Ugric languages:
- The big hole in the middle is Hungarians in Hungary and Southern Slovakia
- The smaller hole a bit to the East are Hungarians in Romania, aka Szeklers
- In the North Finns in Finland and Estonians in Estonia
- Even Norther the Sámi people, they live in Finland, Norway and Sweden, but on this map they are part of the Finnish gap.
There are some Turkic language speakers as well, but they are so small, they are not visible on the map, e.g. Gagauz people in Southern Ukraine. And some part of Turkey is in geographical Europe.
There are much more gaps in European Russia, mostly other Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages. Here is a nice map showing them. And the 100s of different small languages of the Caucasus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_Caucasus
Those are Finland (other more northern one) and Hungary, whose languages belong to the Finno-Ugric family
ez, it’s Basque the ooooold language isolate in Spain, and then the Uralic languages: Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish
It’s true, we still don’t speak English in northern Queensland (Australia) lol
Howyagoincuntay?
@andrew Is the square in SW US Diné? Not sure what it would look like in 1950.
“Indo-European” is a Co-opting term used by Western media to promote a Euro-superior race ( Ahem google the term “Aryan” ) which has previously led to disastrous results.
We need a much more nuanced and much more finer detailed investigations into how languages evolved and human migration, evolution, in-habitation, inter-settlement commerce and local developments happened simultaneously and while influence from both cultures existed it was not “co-opted” or “superior vs inferior” but much more natural , indigenous and SHARED but NOT subsumed by each other.
Had nothing to do with race or media. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
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