TESOL Research Guide: Maps & Atlases

"Most of the projects' data as not in digital form yet, so they are not on-line, but other projects' data have been digitized, to varying degrees of completion. This data is available on the Web."

The Language Map illustrates the concentration of language speakers in zip codes and counties.The Language Map Data Center provides data from Census 2000 about over three hundred languages spoken in the United States, including actual numbers and percentages of speakers. Data from the 2005 American Community Survey about the thirty languages most commonly spoken in the United States provide a snapshot of recent changes in American language communities.

by: Haspelmath, Martin; Call Number: P143 .W67 2008; "[It] consists of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and "hand"/"arm" polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1370 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether 2,650 languages are shown on the maps, and more than 58,000 datapoints give information on features in particular languages. WALS thus makes information on the structural diversity of the world's languages available to a large audience, including interested nonlinguists as well as linguists who would not normally read grammars of exotic languages or specialized works by comparative linguists. Although endangered languages are not particularly emphasized, they are automatically foregrounded because of the large sample of languages represented on each map, where each language (independently of its number of speakers) is shown by a single symbol."