HOME | DD

Description
This is a map that Zveiner and I made for Atlas Altera to depict the prevailing languages of all the countries in the world. Atlas Altera is a syntopian fiction project that leverages the classroom cliché map to reimagine how diversity and co-existence can take shape, all the while building from real but buried geographies. The point of our project is to tell facts through storytelling, because how reality is portrayed often hides the truth.

We invented some of the ATL academic lingo and most of the language family names have been systematically tweaked to have satisfyingly uniform suffixes...because why not? It's fiction after all. Also, not all of language family classifications line up with prevailing how OTL linguistics, but a lot of the work reflects cutting edge research and the current "best guesses" that we have for how numerous languages are related, especially in areas corresponding to OTL Papua, Central Africa, Australia, and South America.

Map Blurb:
The world today boasts 7,168 known lects, each one differentiated by ethnolinguistic identity and mutual intelligibility. As the study of linguistics is dynamic and evergrowing, this number fluctuates. The lects themselves are also always facing pressures and thus are in flux.

More than 40% of the world’s lects are now endangered. With the ascendency of the nation-state and the extension of glossopolitical conditions across much of the world, some 1,300—or only a fifth of the world’s lects—are now a mother tongue for 90% of humankind. Of those lects fortunate enough to be state enfranchised as “languages,” nearly half belong to just five language families—2% of the 227 language families accounted at the state level.

Globalization may very well be an existential threat for linguistic diversity. Over half of humankind can communicate using only twenty languages. Part of this is due to the fact that a large share of the world belongs to a handful of ethnic groups, but more so from the fact that intercultural communication is rapidly being distilled into a dozen or so regional languages, five SoN-lects, and one world-spanning sign language.

Today, English is the most commonly leveraged pluricentric language in the world, having also the greatest range of influence across the globe. One of the world’s other most widespread pluricentric languages is a creole, Kampani, with nearly no native speakers. Also without a native community is Mandarin, which stands out for being the only literary pluricentric language in the world. Revolving around its ideatric logographs, Mandarin is often written without having to be pronounced, making it easier to be adapted across cultures belonging to disparate language families, while also adding magnitudes of complexity for mastering.

Support this kind of content:
To access in-depth lore and footnotes (such as the footnotes that link all the OTL language families represented on this map), or to download a high resolution print-quality version join the Patreon! Your funds will go to supporting me as well as other collaborators of the project. There's also a SPECIAL OFFER of receiving a postcard from Altera + 2 free vinyl stickers in the mail right now for anyone who pledges this month.

Otherwise, please join the community around this project on r/AtlasAltera or Discord (link in the subreddit). I'm also doing backstage-style discussions for this project with my friend, which you can watch on YouTube. I'm hoping to start a new style of shorter videos too, so do subscribe to the channel to stay tuned.

Description
This is a map that Zveiner and I made for Atlas Altera to depict the prevailing languages of all the countries in the world. Atlas Altera is a syntopian fiction project that leverages the classroom cliché map to reimagine how diversity and co-existence can take shape, all the while building from real but buried geographies. The point of our project is to tell facts through storytelling, because how reality is portrayed often hides the truth.

We invented some of the ATL academic lingo and most of the language family names have been systematically tweaked to have satisfyingly uniform suffixes...because why not? It's fiction after all. Also, not all of language family classifications line up with prevailing how OTL linguistics, but a lot of the work reflects cutting edge research and the current "best guesses" that we have for how numerous languages are related, especially in areas corresponding to OTL Papua, Central Africa, Australia, and South America.

Map Blurb:
The world today boasts 7,168 known lects, each one differentiated by ethnolinguistic identity and mutual intelligibility. As the study of linguistics is dynamic and evergrowing, this number fluctuates. The lects themselves are also always facing pressures and thus are in flux.

More than 40% of the world’s lects are now endangered. With the ascendency of the nation-state and the extension of glossopolitical conditions across much of the world, some 1,300—or only a fifth of the world’s lects—are now a mother tongue for 90% of humankind. Of those lects fortunate enough to be state enfranchised as “languages,” nearly half belong to just five language families—2% of the 227 language families accounted at the state level.

Globalization may very well be an existential threat for linguistic diversity. Over half of humankind can communicate using only twenty languages. Part of this is due to the fact that a large share of the world belongs to a handful of ethnic groups, but more so from the fact that intercultural communication is rapidly being distilled into a dozen or so regional languages, five SoN-lects, and one world-spanning sign language.

Today, English is the most commonly leveraged pluricentric language in the world, having also the greatest range of influence across the globe. One of the world’s other most widespread pluricentric languages is a creole, Kampani, with nearly no native speakers. Also without a native community is Mandarin, which stands out for being the only literary pluricentric language in the world. Revolving around its ideatric logographs, Mandarin is often written without having to be pronounced, making it easier to be adapted across cultures belonging to disparate language families, while also adding magnitudes of complexity for mastering.

Support this kind of content:
To access in-depth lore and footnotes (such as the footnotes that link all the OTL language families represented on this map), or to download a high resolution print-quality version join the Patreon! Your funds will go to supporting me as well as other collaborators of the project. There's also a SPECIAL OFFER of receiving a postcard from Altera + 2 free vinyl stickers in the mail right now for anyone who pledges this month.

Otherwise, please join the community around this project on r/AtlasAltera or Discord (link in the subreddit). I'm also doing backstage-style discussions for this project with my friend, which you can watch on YouTube. I'm hoping to start a new style of shorter videos too, so do subscribe to the channel to stay tuned.