I like languages! I want to collect them all like Pokémon. But without, like, actually having to be a field linguist.
I also enjoy GeoGuessr, the game where you are somewhere in the world on Google Street View and you need to deduce where you are.
I've been working for about 8 months on a custom map (set of locations) called Lots of Languages! The theme of this map is that every location has some text visible, in at least one language that isn't English, and over 210 languages are represented. There's more than 1,000 locations the map could put you in now, giving it a reasonable amount of replayability before the birthday paradox means you see a duplicate location.
There are said to be at least 6,000 living languages in the world. Many of them are endangered. Many of them are unwritten. Many many of them, even though they are written at times, don't have the kind of status that would get them written in really big letters on signs, particularly signs that the Google car drives past (or where someone else takes a photosphere and submits it to Google Street View).
So this really limits the range of languages you can find in GeoGuessr, but there are still a lot to be found if you look for them!
This was inspired by a map called A Linguistic World by Nuujaka. That map is succumbing to bit-rot over the years and also, in my view, overrepresents European languages too much. When I mentioned that among GeoGuessr players, some asked "what if you made your own?" So I did.
Partial "spoilers" for these locations appear in the alt texts, and below the fold.
The languages represented in the photos on this post are:
- Somali
- Abenaki (and French)
- Divehi (and the Latin alphabet, for decoration)
- Tok Pisin (and English). Tok Pisin is a language that largely involves cramming English vocabulary into Austronesian phonology and grammar, so you can actually sound out what it means in English in a lot of cases.
