And from a North American perspective, countries such as Australia and Indonesia appear much smaller than they actually are. Comparing the landmasses on the same latitude as Canada helps put sizes into perspective. In reality, Greenland is about fourteen times smaller than Africa. Critics of the map—and similar projections—suggest that distortion reinforces a sense of colonialist superiority. As well, the amount of territory a country occupies is often correlated with power and access to natural resources, and map distortions can have the effect of inadvertently diminishing nations closer to the equator.
In our society we unconsciously equate size with importance and even power. Growing awareness of map distortion is translating into concrete change. Boston public schools, for example, recently switched to the Gall-Peters projection , which more accurately depicts the true size of landmasses. As well, Google, whose map app is used by approximately one billion people per month, took the bold step of using different projections for different purposes in The Earth is depicted as a globe at further zoom levels, sidestepping map projection issues completely and displaying the world as it actually is: round.
In , mathematician and astronomer, Karl Mollweide, created a namesake projection that trades accuracy of angles and shape for accuracy of proportion. The Mollweide projection has inspired many other attempts at a user-friendly equal area map. Another evolution in cartography was the Dymaxion map , invented by Buckminster Fuller and patented in In this version, the continents are no longer in their familiar positions—however, there is more spacial fidelity than in previous projection methods.
Using a new map-making method called AuthaGraph , Japanese architect, Hajime Narukawa, may have created the most accurate map of the world yet. AuthaGraph divides the globe into 96 triangles, transfers them to a tetrahedron and unfolds into a rectangle.
The end result? Landmasses and seas are more accurately proportioned than in traditional projections. The biggest downfall of the AuthaGraph map is that longitude and latitude lines are no longer a tidy grid. As well, continents on the map are repositioned in a way that will be unfamiliar to a population that is already geographically challenged.
That said, depicting our round world on a flat surface will always come with some trade-offs. As demand grows for a true equal-area map, it will be exciting to see what the next generation of map projections have to offer. Looking to learn more about maps and map projections?
This fantastic tool , created by Florian Ledermann, allows users to take a vast selection of projection styles, and modify them in different ways. This hands-on approach is a fun way to learn how the shape of landmasses shift as the projection changes. Although varieties in use in India and Pakistan by well-educated speakers are somewhat more distinct than the local vernaculars, the differences are still minimal—far less significant than those separating Mandarin from Cantonese, for example.
For an extreme example of this phenomenon, consider the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, spoken over much of the territory of the former Yugoslavia and generally considered a single language with different local dialects and writing systems. Within this territory, Serbs who are largely Orthodox use a Cyrillic alphabet, while Croats largely Roman Catholic use the Latin alphabet. Within a period of only a few years after the breakup of Yugoslavia as a political entity, at least three new languages Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian had emerged, although the actual linguistic facts had not changed a bit.
What is mutual intelligibility and can it help us identify different languages? One common-sense notion of when we are dealing with different languages, as opposed to different forms of the same language, is the criterion of mutual intelligibility : if the speakers of A can understand the speakers of B without difficulty, A and B must be the same language. But this notion fails in practice to cut the world up into clearly distinct language units.
In some instances, speakers of A can understand B, but not vice versa, or at least speakers of B will insist that they cannot. Bulgarians, for instance, consider Macedonian a dialect of Bulgarian, but Macedonians insist that it is a distinct language. Somewhat less fancifully, Kalabari and Nembe are two linguistic varieties spoken in Nigeria. The Nembe claim to be able to understand Kalabari with no difficulty, but the rather more prosperous Kalabari regard the Nembe as poor country cousins whose speech is unintelligible.
Another reason why the criterion of mutual intelligibility fails to tell us how many distinct languages there are in the world is the existence of dialect continua. To illustrate, suppose you were to start from Berlin and walk to Amsterdam, covering about ten miles every day. You can be sure that the people who provided your breakfast each morning could understand and be understood by the people who served you supper that evening.
Nonetheless, the German speakers at the beginning of your trip and the Dutch speakers at its end would have much more trouble, and certainly think of themselves as speaking two quite distinct if related languages. In some parts of the world, such as the Western Desert in Australia, such a continuum can stretch well over a thousand miles, with the speakers in each local region able to understand one another while the ends of the continuum are clearly not mutually intelligible at all.
How many languages are represented in such a case? Related to this is the fact that we refer to the language of, say, Chaucer , Shakespeare , Thomas Jefferson and George W. Shakespeare might have been able, with some difficulty, to converse with Chaucer or with Jefferson, but Jefferson and certainly Bush would need an interpreter for Chaucer.
Languages change gradually over time, maintaining intelligibility across adjacent generations, but eventually yielding very different systems. The notion of distinctness among languages, then, is much harder to resolve than it seems at first sight. Political and social considerations trump purely linguistic reality, and the criterion of mutual intelligibility is ultimately inadequate.
So does the science of Linguistics provide a better basis for measuring the number of different languages spoken in the world? When we address the question of just when forms of speech differ systematically from a linguistic point of view, we get answers that are potentially crisp and clear, but rather surprising. If we try to distinguish languages from one another simply in terms of their words and the patterns we can observe in sentences, problems arise.
Different languages may display the same sentence patterns, while a single language may display a great variety of patterns. In general, linguists have found that the analysis of the external facts of language use gives us at best a slippery object of study. Rather more coherent, it seems, is the study of the abstract knowledge speakers have which allows them to produce and understand what they say or hear or read: their internalized knowledge of the grammar of their language.
We might propose, then, that instead of counting languages in terms of external forms, we might try to count the range of distinct grammars in the world. How might we do this? What differentiates one grammar from another? While Russian grammar is renowned to be a little tricky, Russian only has about , words English has roughly one million , which is why most of them have more than one meaning. Language family: Romance, a sub-branch of Indo-European.
In , a new agreement was signed to standardise spelling forms across different variations. Portuguese is rooted in the region of Medieval Galicia which was partly in the north of Portugal and partly in the northwest of Spain , but only five percent of the million native Portuguese speakers actually live in Portugal.
Related to: Malay, Javanese, Sundranese, Madurese etc. And despite Western preconceptions, with a simple structure and easy pronunciation in its favour, Indonesian is surprisingly easy to learn. Fun fact: Hindi and Urdu speakers can have a simple conversation just fine — provided they keep things relatively simple! The lingua franca of Pakistan and very close to Hindi, Urdu has crept up on the most spoken languages list in the last year or so.
Dubbed by some as the language of love for its intriguing-sounding and beautiful words, the French language may have some competition on its hands…. Language family: West Germanic, a sub-family of Indo-European. Fun fact: German is known for its seemingly endless sentences. Often referred to as the language of writers and thinkers, German has just over million native — and just under 32 non-native — speakers worldwide, and is the most spoken language in the European Union. Start learning with us today.
Learn a language for free. The fastest way to learn a new language: 9 top tips. Recent numbers put Arabic at around million native speakers. But this is another instance of numbers not telling the full tale: Arabic, like Chinese, is so vastly different in its respective dialects as to be effectively a number of languages, grouped as one for the sake of convenience.
Modern Standard Arabic is a primarily written form, closely related to the Classical Arabic of the Quran. However, the spoken forms of Arabic in, say, Oman and Morocco are so different that a couple of philosophy professors from these countries might be able to discuss the finer points of the ancient texts while still struggling to order lunch. This is another language whose reach owes much to its colonial past. Starting in the 15th century, avid Portuguese traders and conquerors brought their language to Africa, Asia and the Americas.
The spread of Portuguese may have initially been tied to European colonization, but the colonized countries developed their own vibrant cultures that transformed the language forever. It is the language of Kolkata, the Andaman Islands, fabulous sweets, and odd million Bangladeshis — many of whom are extremely vulnerable to climate change. By the next century, the population is projected to double while 15 percent of the land area is expected to disappear below rising seas.
With roughly million native speakers, Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world. Famed for its inscrutable grammar and quite lovely Cyrillic script, it remains one of the six languages spoken in the United Nations, and produced the literary likes of Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Pushkin. Almost all of the million native Japanese speakers live in Japan — certainly the most highly geographically concentrated of all the languages on this list.
Japanese boasts two distinct writing systems, hiragana and katakana , as well making extensive use of Chinese Kanji characters.
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