I read in the newspaper about the history of the Ukrainian language, and how it become different from the Russian during the Polish-Lithuanian Union.
That reminded me that I had saved years ago some maps from a site called “Historical Atlas of Europe and the Middle East”. Unfortunately that site no more exists, it existed back in 1997.
Anyway, I post the map that I had in my mind.
… and more maps are found here.
Almost three years ago I updated the a webpage that tells where a specific language is spoken.
This page ws called “Where on Earth Do They Speak…”. The page itself consists of a list of languages, and clicking the language name would show the location on map.
Now there’s a new page that lets the user zoom and pan the world and see what language(s) are spoken on an area of interest. This new Languages of the World page is available here: http://maps.verbix.com/languages.html
Links:
Finland is a country with two official languages: Finnish and Swedish. Swedish is spoken mostly on the coastal areas, including the capital Helsinki (Finnish) / Helsingfors (Swedish).
Because Helsinki/Helsingfors is a bilingual town, all the placenames are shown in two languages. Sometimes there are mistakes, however, that can mislead people.
The picture at right was taken in Kronohagen, Helsinfors. Kulosaari as shown on the shield is Brändö in Swedish. So either Finnish or Swedish speaking cyclists will find themselves in wrong place 😉
More links:
I bough the other day Kielikello, a magazine of language use in Finnish. There was an interesting news about a new portal with Swedish placenames that was opened recently.
That reminded me of the fact that National Land Survey of Finland has released their geoinformation as open source. Not much later I downloaded the placename data of all Finnish topographic (1:25,000) maps.
From the dataset with 2 Million names, I extracted the Swedish names and put them on map. Not surprisingly the Swedish placenames are located in the same area where Swedish is spoken in Finland; the coastal areas in south and west. These are marked in red on the map.
My plan is to later add the possibility to drill down in the map and let users check different kinds of names; house names, lake names, to name a few.
References:
The languages are not static; the languages evolve, new languages appear, and some languages disappear. Besides these changes the speakers might also migrate from one place to another.
This has happened in the history, and this goes on today.
Based on information of people migrations, I compiled a map that shows languages of Europe. This is not a typical map that shows what language is spoken where and today. Instead it’s a ‘heatmap’. The darker color, the more there have been different cultures and languages in the area.
Links:
During the summer vacations we visited Denmark. At one store I bought a book about Danish colonies around the world!
One of the colonies was in the West Indies, on the today’s U.S. Virgin Islands. This former Danish colony was sold to the U.S. under one hundred years ago.
The Danish West Indies islands are marked in green in this map from the school atlas of my grand grand father.
Today Danish is not spoken on the islands, except if you happen to encounter a tourist from Denmark.
Links:
Google Maps is one of my favorite tools that I use when surfing in the Internet.
Today I zoomed to islands outside the Estonian coast, and guess what? I found an island with the following names of villages: Borrby, Rälby, Diby, Norrby, Söderby, Hosby, Sviby, Bussby, Förby, and Saxby. All these names are typical Swedish names.
Looking back in the history, there’s a good reason for the Swedish place names; during most of its history, the island has been inhabited by Estonian Swedes (“rannarootslased” in Estonian or “coastal Swedes” in English), whose population reached 3,000 before World War II. During the war, nearly all of Vormsi’s population, along with other Swedes living in Estonia, were evacuated, or fled, to Sweden. The island’s current population is approximately 240 inhabitants.
Links:
Swedish language is a Germanic language that is spoken in Sweden and in Finland. In Finland, the Swedish language is the second official language. Swedish is spoken on coastal areas in Finland.
There are four main variants of the Swedish in Finland as shown on the map. The spoken variations differ quite a lot from each other, but as a written language they are all the same. The written language is the same in Finland and in Sweden.
Links to go:
I was looking for something — can’t really know for what — when I discovered a short article that I had teared off from some newspaper.
The article tells about a stone with runic inscriptions that has been found in Eksymäjärvi, near Oulu in Finland.
The article itself didn’t tell more than where it was found, who owned the stone, and that it had been sent to an archeologist. I didn’t find anything more related to this stone by googling today.
I look forward in hearing more about the stone. And of course information on when it was written and in what language.
More about runes:
I read another day in the newspaper about a Sami person who told that, in order to learn Finnish and Finnish ethnohistory, they should study Sami.
Having read the text, I remembered a map in a book that I read recently. And the map showed how the only people that dwelled in Northern Europe were Sami.
The map to the right shows the linguistic situation in Europe in 600 BC. The Sami people are displayed in light yellow, and the other (Fenno-)Ugric languages in yellow. As seen the ancestors of today’s Finnish speaking population lived in today’s Estonia and in a very limited area of today’s Southern Finland coast area.
Since then both the Finnish and Germanic tribes have pushed the Sami northward.
More to read:
