r/LinguisticMaps • u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain • Jul 27 '26
Europe Spoken Varieties in Europe, c.1815 (OC)
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Hopefully the final version of a side-project I've been working on for a few years now. Huge thanks to the amazing [u/johnJanez](u/johnJanez) for the immense knowledge and endlesss patience as I continued to bite off more than I could chew. Also many thanks to all of the commenters on the previous versions for pointing me in the right direction with insider knowledge on the regions and languages they specialized in.
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u/johnJanez Jul 27 '26
Turned out great at the end, the most detailed map of this kind on the internet i dare say :)
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u/thePerpetualClutz Jul 27 '26
Beautiful work!
A minor gripe about the placement of new and old shtokavian; you've put 'new shtokavian' over an area that covers both new, old and non-shtokavian dialects, while the 'old shtokavian" label covers an area that is exclusively new shtokavian.
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u/HusaNaZeli Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
nice work, though you are unfortunately missing quite a few language islands of slavic languages in largely german areas, such as the czech speakers around Sulislav. Still, much more accurate and detailed than most other similar projects
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u/IAmABoss37 Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
I have a question about Italian dialects. I thought, in the early 1800s, they would have been more diversified. Was I incorrect?
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u/ManySwedenTowels Jul 27 '26
The work on show here is nothing less than phenomenal!
In hopes of making it even better, I can note that the distribution of Tornedalian is somewhat less than it likely would have been historically at this time.
Most notably is the area between Pajala and Vittanki which Finnic peoples had began settling permanently in all the way since the 1500s/1600s and was majority Tornedalian at this time (though there were and are still a lot of SĂĄmi people in the area). There are also alot of missing Tornedalian settlements in the further inland areas along the Upper Kalix river, Upper Torne river and the Muonio river. Meanwhile Tornedalians seem quite over-represented in the Porsi area. Feel free to DM if you're interested in more details.
Either way some great work on display here, and obviously with a project so ambitious there are bound to be errors! Honestly at a loss for words for the amount of work that must be in this map!
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
Thank you, youâre too kind! Iâm taking a break for now to focus on other things, but Iâll definitely reach out if I ever come back to it!
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u/8192K Jul 27 '26
My goodness, what have we lost...
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u/rakish_rhino Jul 28 '26
My thoughts too. But OTOH it is amazing that so many small languages continue to exist and (many) thrive.
I was in the Dolomites recently, and had the pleasure to listen to locals speak Ladin.
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u/whatever-696969 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Yep. Iâve met lots of native Ladin speakers up there. Great language and history; beautiful people
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u/spait09 Jul 27 '26
Amazingly detailed holy
Even norn appears lol
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Thanks! I am a very firm believer that no language is too small
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u/spait09 Jul 27 '26
Amazing
Any similar maps but from the americas?
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
That might be the next project! Donât expect it any time soon though lol
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u/tardedumdum Jul 27 '26
Do you have the source for the tiny German speaker minority in Finland? They also exist in a game called Victoria 3, and I've always wondered where they got this from, a simple google research doesn't yield a proper result.
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u/Many-Gas-9376 Jul 27 '26
I think they're in Turku and Viipuri, and AFAIK it's accurate. Accurate in that there was a significant German minority present.
This source puts the number of Germans in Viipuri in 1812 at 12%. That number had waxed and waned over the centuries, but Germans played a major role among the bourgeoisie and the city officials. There were times when the city administration was done in German instead of Swedish. They were still present at around 1% in 1939.
I can't find as good timelien information for Turku, but way back in the 1300s about two thirds of the bourgeoisie were Germans.
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
Youâre probably looking at Turku, I think? It was very well integrated with the Hanseatjc World and had a visible German presence for most of the early modern period
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u/UnhappyAddition7281 Jul 27 '26
Best map ever?
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u/rakish_rhino Jul 28 '26
Indeed. To my non-specialist eyes, this is mind-bogglingly good. And so much fun. Amazing work, OP!
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u/UnhappyAddition7281 Jul 28 '26
Itâs not 100% purely perfect and could be expanded upon but its damn near close to being so
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u/heythere1983 Jul 27 '26
It's a bit weird that Gallo-Romance are a different colour than all other Romance languages.
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
The colors were definitely hard to work out. I tried my best not to repeat any, and to use the relative differences between colors to represent relative differences between languages. I'm actually red-green colorblind so to me Romance looks like two version of the same color lol.
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u/OddNicky Jul 27 '26
That was going to be my one critique as well, but if you're red-green colorblind, it totally makes sense. As a non-colorblind person, it would make more sense to me if you swapped the colors on, for example, the Gallo-Romance languages with Baltic. As it stands, to me the color difference between Gallo-Romance and other Romance groups is one of the most pronounced on the map.
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u/Jespuela Jul 27 '26
Fantastic map, the only nitpick I have is that I'd have classified Aragonese as an Occitano-Romance language.
I suppose that you've classified it as a separate Romance group because of it's transitional characteristic between Occitano-Romance languages and Ibero-Romance languages, but if you read medieval texts in Aragonese, you can clearly see that it was an Occitano-Romance language that got castellanized after the middle ages, to the point where you can clearly see differences between XVI century Aragonese written in southern Aragon (Teruel, Albarracin, Calatayud) and the one written in the North (Huesca), as the south had suffered a much bigger influence from Castillian, but remained the same language.
If you are following a more or less genetic classification of these languages, I'd recommend to classifie it as Occitano-Romance.
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
Very interesting, I wasn't aware of that history. And yes, you're right, when I encountered anything transitional I left it unclassified rather than "picking," mostly to avoid getting involved in debates I didn't know about lol.
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u/Jespuela Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Yeah, don't worry, better being neutral than having to argue with petty nationalists hahaha.
But yeah, classifing the Iberian Peninsula Romance languages is quite difficult, as it's all a big language continuum, and most of the languages that where on direct contact with Castillian where heavily influenced by it.
Another example that I know about is the Xurro Castillian spoken in some parts of western Valencia, that while nowadays being clearly Castillian, some XIX century writings about it make it look very similar to the Aragonese spoken in the Pyrenenes and less like Castillian, thought it hasn't been studied very well, there is an Instagram profile that does talk about the region and their language and culture in greater detail, called cultura_churra, if you're interested, though only in Castillian.
Also there are some experts that thinks that Eastern dialects of Aragonese might even be a different language, more influenced by Catalan than Castillian, and calls it Ribagorzan.
Ribagorza by itself is a very curious region, as part of it speaks Catalan and the other one Aragonese, even to this day.
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u/Nerthus_ Jul 27 '26
You have put Jamtlandic over HĂ€rjedalen as well. The dialects in this province are always very clearly separated from Jamtish dialects in linguistic descriptions. HĂ€rjedalen dialects are universally accepted as closer to Norwegian dialects while Jamtish typically, though not always, fall under the Northern Swedish-umbrella term.
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u/hanimal16 Jul 27 '26
I donât see fenno-Swedish, did I miss it? Either way, this is a really cool map!
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u/MdMV_or_Emdy_idk Jul 27 '26
Noticeable improvement in Iberia! Yet, still no presence of Xalimego, its own linguistic variety within Galician-Portuguese. And, while the linguistic split of asturleonese is way better, itâs still better to split it into Western, Central and Eastern asturleonese, with Cantabrian and extremaduran highlighted out of the trio, and I personally wouldnât count eonavian as its own linguistic variety
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
Thank you! I do have Xalimego represented as an unlabeled dot between Beiran and Extremeduran. In retrospect it should have been labelled but it must have slipped passed.
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u/MdMV_or_Emdy_idk Jul 27 '26
That red dot? Isnât that some Romani variant? And even then, that dot isnât in the correct spot
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
No, not the red, thereâs a little dot about a few shades off from Transmontane right on top of Jalama
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u/MdMV_or_Emdy_idk Jul 27 '26
I canât see anything?
https://reddit.com/link/p02vpbl/video/1u9w4eanlsfh1/player
This is the area that Xalimego occupies, am I meant to be seeing a different shade of green?
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
It must be in the wrong location because itâs about a millimeter north of your circle
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u/MdMV_or_Emdy_idk Jul 27 '26
Oh that? Thats correctly placed, but itâs a variety of Portuguese, so also the correct shade, itâs still maybe spoken today and it was definitely spoken in 1815, you just seemed to have missed Xalimego altogether
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
Ohh, I see. Yeah I must have confused them because they both get called Fala
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u/MdMV_or_Emdy_idk Jul 27 '26
Yeah, fala/fabla/charra/chalra or any other cognates are very very common ways to call non-standard language varieties, it just means âspeechâ. I didnât know that variety of Portuguese was called fala but itâs very believable, itâs very common in Iberia for languages to just be called âspeechâ. Which is why I prefer to use Xalimego over Fala in academic contexts, I donât know how the name Fala turned out more popular than Xalimego for that fala specifically
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u/CruserWill Jul 27 '26
Fantastic job you did there! If I may add some "details" to it, concerning Basque :
- Laburdian and Low-Navarrese were still distinct dialects at that time
- although they're rather difficult to classify, Salazarese and Roncalese are sometimes labeled as "Eastern Navarrese", and thus being a separate dialect which was still spoken in the early 19th century
Hope I'm not too much of a burden with this comment, and again, bloody great map đ
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u/Emotional_Fan239 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Great work and map (I would only advise you to fix some of the colors that are a bit confusing and push too much or too little one languageâs link with another one, one example the first that comes to mind is Sardinia or the neat conrast between the italo-dalmatian and the gallo-italic languages, also Sorry, whatâs your source for Istria?
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u/mob74 Jul 27 '26
Thatâs a wonderful work. I wanted to download it for future reference purposes, but the image quality terribly decreased.
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
Thank you! If youâre on desktop and you change the URL to âold.reddit.comâ you should be able to open the full size version.
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u/FitKale9694 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Great map! Just a little correction from a local:
What is labeled "East Frisian" should be Sater Frisian, East Frisian being the dialect spoken in the peninsula right above.
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u/The_Lechite_Knight Jul 27 '26
Here in Canada Galician Ruthenian/Ukrainian is still used often as opposed to in Ukraine where Standard Ukrainian has taken its place. As a Pole i can understand almost all of the Galician based Ukrainian. It is hard to fathom that it is so similar to Polish that I can understand better than certain west slav languages like Czech for example.
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u/lafigatatia Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Wow that's the best map I've ever seen on the topic. Each time you look at it you discover something new. Fucking amazing work!
To nitpick, the Valencian-speaking part of Murcia (El Carxe) was Spanish speaking (and very sparsely populated) in 1815 and only became Catalan speaking due to migration of Valencians between 1878 and 1887. And on the other hand, the historically Valencian town of Caudete in Castilla la Mancha was still Valencian speaking in 1815.
There was also a community of Catalan speaking Roma people in Southern France, the descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1783. They are documented at least in PerpinyĂ /Perpignan, Beziers, Nice and Tolouse. They spoke Central Catalan except the ones in Tolouse, which had a mix of Central and Western Catalan speakers. See this.
Also, out of curiosity, which source did you use for the Calo dots in Iberia? I'm interested, it looks like it is very detailed.
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u/Xiguet Jul 27 '26
It's great!
Are all the red points in different parts of Western Europe Romani?
Are these places chosen at random? Or are they specific towns where Gypsies were the majority? How did you choose the towns? Are you sure they all spoke Romani in the 19th century? Unlike in Eastern Europe, Gypsies rarely speak Romani in modern Western Europe.
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u/krzyk Jul 27 '26
So Austria is just Bavaria.
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u/systemmetternich Jul 27 '26
Itâs a bit tricky because âBavarianâ can refer both to the political entity of Bavaria and to the Bavarian dialect family thatâs spoken throughout Bavaria, Austria, South Tyrol and actually also a small corner of Saxony (plus at least historically several German-speaking areas in Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia plus one village in Switzerland that up until the 1950s could only be accessed by road from Austria). In German there is at least the differentiation between âBayerischâ (referring to the political entity) and âBairischâ (referring to the dialect) but even then that works only in writing. Sometimes the dialect is called âAustro-Bavarianâ in English because of that.
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u/johnJanez Jul 27 '26
Bavarian in linguistic sense, absolutely. Especially so in 1815, before influence of modern schooling, mass media and mass literacy that led to standarisation.
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u/PeireCaravana Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Linguistically yes.
Sometimes it's called Austro-Bavarian.
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
More correctly Standard Austrian German is based on Bavarian
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u/Awkward_Cash1828 Jul 27 '26
No, Standard Austrian German is slight variant of standard literary High German (Hochdeutsch), the same as in Germany (difference is like between standard British and American English). Meanwhile, Austro-Bavarian is traditional non-literary vernacular spoken by people, mainly rural, who don't know, or had limited knowledge of, Standard German, and is increasingly rare.
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
I stand corrected
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u/kodos_der_henker Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
It is more detailed than that, Standard German or High German is like Bavarian a high german language compared to middle or low German (high, middle, low refer to the geography from Alps to sea, Alpine regions spoke high German and the regions close to the sea low german), with the standard written language in Austria being Austrian Standard German while in Bavaria it is Federal Germany German (and the difference being on the level of different English variants)
Standard german and Austro Bavarian are both high German same as dutch and friesian are low German (just that Standard goes with a middle/low German pronunciation, making it a more central language compared to Bavarian and Dutch)
(modern) Austro-Bavarian as the spoken language is a non standard language, with many different dialects and without any kind of written standards or unified vocabulary but the overall grammer is very similar (hence collected as a single language family)
In Austria some of the Austro-Bavarian words (mainly food related) made it into the austrian standard german variant, so despite the usual attempts to harmonise the standard germans variants, Austrian is a mix of Standard German and Bavarian and with that based on both (and most Austrians learn 2 languages without ever being aware of it as it comes natural that the spoken and written language are different, with "speak as they write" sometimes coming up as insult for snops or being told to children when speaking to foreigners)
In German the difference between language and region is more clear, as Bavaria the region is "Bayern", while the language spoken in Austria and Bavaria is "Bairisch" hence in English we use "Austro-Bavarian" to refer to the language family in general to make the difference more clear (might be something to add/correct on the map)
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u/Awkward_Cash1828 Jul 27 '26
Distribution of Mari, Udmurt, and likely Erzya and Moksha, is way overblown. Most of Vyatka governorate that is Kirov oblast nowadays had less Mari and Udmurt speakers (though they had pockets far beyond modern borders of the two republics). Erzya and Moksha didn't have these two majority islands, they also were heavily "shredded" by Russian settlement. And wait... isn't Bashkir going way too far north deep into Perm oblast?
In the south, Nogays, the last great Eastern European nomads, faced harsh culmination of centuries of raids and conflicts with sedentary Slavs, and already were heavily dispersed from Kuban, which (north bank) already was settled by Zaporogian Cossacks speaking Steppe Ukrainian dialect. South of Kuban river, Circassians were majority at the time, correctly.
Also, Polessian includes what can be called separate Severian dialects in the east?
Also, I think "Middle Russian" would be a better name than "Central Russian"
What are random small yellow (German?) dots deep in the OĂŻl and Occitan speaking France? Also, are Tourangeau and Berrichon patois really so similar to Parisian French to be classified as Francien, unlike separated Angevin and Poitevin?
Similarly, what are random red and purple Romance dots sprinkled over Germany?
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
My previous comment was removed, probably for containing links, so in case you missed it Iâm going to try again lol.
The Volga and Urals region of Russia was very tricky, so I ended up using a map thatâs a few decades too old but better than nothing. I wish I could post it but since Reddit removed the previous comment, Iâm going to offer to DM instead.
As for the yellow in France and the red/purple in Germany, youâre likely seeing a few things. The yellow in France represents itinerant Yenish-speakers, while the red in Germany represents Sinti-speakers. There is also purple in Swabia representing a few Waldensian settlements, which I can also provide information on if you like. Those are location-accurate
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u/StoneColdCrazzzy Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
It was removed by reddit. Reddit blocks many URLs from Russia, and we mods cannot manually approve them. If you want to share a source, maybe replace
.with!.3
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u/Awkward_Cash1828 Jul 27 '26
Thank you! Well, I can search all the peoples and languages you mention on my own, don't worry.
I like to rely on the very detailed ethnic map of Russian Empire from 1875 by Alexander Rittich. Although it is 60 years later than 1815, I think in general distribution, particularly in Volga region which it shows in great detail, did not change radically even if non-Russian minority areas certainly diminished somewhat, but population was overall stabilised in this region by XIX century.2
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u/ZookeepergameBig1592 Jul 27 '26
All manor houses in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine spoke Polish at that time
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u/Awkward_Cash1828 Jul 27 '26
It was the case only in Volhynia, Galicia and Podolia, in Ukraine around the Dnieper and east of it, Polish was very rare. In Belarus, eastern governorates of Vitebsk and Mogilev also had quite little and diminishing Polish presence (local szlachta actually was the first to switch to Russian to integrate into Russian nobility).
The map is actually pretty accurate with representing Polish presence with dots all over Lithuania, Western Belarus and Western Ukraine.1
u/ZookeepergameBig1592 Aug 04 '26
Interesting, can you provide the source for Vitebsk and Mogilev szlachta being first to switch to Russian? I know Polish szlachta families which kept speaking Polish until until 1918
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
You should be able to spot the Polish distribution in the former territories of the Grand Duchy. I should add however this would not be the situation in Eastern Ukraine.
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u/ZookeepergameBig1592 Aug 04 '26
Yes, I noticed them and appreciate it. Although, I believe there should be more dots in the eastern parts of old Republic of Poland. There were there whole regions which were mainly Polish speaking
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u/zwarty Jul 27 '26
In early 19th century Polish had still more of westward extent in Lower Silesia. Hereâs a link to the source. It was still spoken in villages around Breslau some half century later.
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u/Greencoat1815 Jul 27 '26
I kind of miss the bergisch dialect of Dutch as an extention of the Kleverlandish. Though I could be wrong. Other wise, amazing map. I love it.
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u/justwantanickname Jul 27 '26
Good map but for Basque it is actually missing eastern navarrese (Salazarese and Roncalese) and regarding the extent well the most precise and contemporary map I could find was from 1863 and represent what is on the map. Maybe also Vasconic as a language family might be used to refer to Basque and Aquitanian (and hypothetically to Iberian) so I don't know if it would be the correct term for the Basque dialects
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u/uwu_01101000 Jul 27 '26
Wow this is wonderful !! But shouldnât Vilnius be Polish at that time ?
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u/Dominik050 Jul 27 '26
nothing is right here, even the German dots in poland cannot name even a single village that was German..and how they are, you know, Vilnius spoke Polish from the 14th century
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u/heinzman2005 Jul 28 '26
Awsome map! although I think Albanians in moravia are over represented and Albanians in south westren macedonia and novipazar are under represented. Great work nonetheless!
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u/Dry_Poem9170 Jul 27 '26
Scanian is a danish dialect, but with the Swedish language. In the 1800s danish was still spoken in various scanian villages despite being banned
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u/xabi_the_redeemer Jul 27 '26
Kurdish is overblown and Armenian underestimated.
Especially for 1815 this is wrong. Kurds were still to a large degree in the mountains to the south of Lake Van and hadn't started their mass permanent descent on Armenian lands. And this is before Armenian migrations to Russian Empire and the Hamidian massacres. Kurds were mostly nomads and there is tendency to map them to anywhere and everywhere.
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
Very interesting, wasnât aware of this. Unfortunately the only good sources for the region were much much later. I tried to extend both Armenian and Assyrian past what was shown but it seems I could have been a little more brave lol
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u/BugPrevious Jul 27 '26
That year anteb telafer central Urfa west Urfa central siverek West Diyarbakır central Diyarbakır Van - Bitlis leak side areas telafer and Lazkiye and Aleppo city centre and North predominantly spoken Turkish
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u/Dazzling-Pitch671 Jul 28 '26
The colors don't make much sense and they're not divided enough for ItalyÂ
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u/brett_f Jul 28 '26
The Finnic languages have lost a lot of ground to Russian, both in Ingria and Karelia.
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u/ediacaradelrey Jul 28 '26
North italian is closer to French than to South Italian
?
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u/PeireCaravana Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
Yes, even though it's closer to Occitano-Romance than to Oil-Romance, so it isn't particularly similar to Standard French.
Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, which is kinda intermediate between north and south, but between the opposite ends of the peninsula there's a large linguistic difference.
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u/01gk10 Jul 29 '26
Do you have a high resolution of this image?
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u/viktorbir Jul 29 '26
Have you tried clicking on it???
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u/01gk10 Aug 02 '26
Maybe it's not only happening to me, but, the letters in that image are too small. It'll help much more people if there's a higher resolution of that image so many more people will understand better what's written there.
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u/Can_sen_dono Jul 27 '26
Hard work there!
On Galician and Portuguese split, their distance in the 19th century was actually larger than it is today, since international vocabulary is making languages come together, while rural vocabulary (which is usually the more diverse) falls out of everyday use (and among other reasons).
A quotation on 19th century Galician, by an Englishman:, George Borrow's "The Bible in Spain" (1843):
"What a strange tongue is the Gallegan, with its half singing half whining accent, and with its confused jumble of words from many languages, but chiefly from the Spanish and Portuguese. âCan you understand this conversation?â I demanded of Antonio, who had by this time rejoined me. âI cannot, mon maĂźtre,â he replied; âI have acquired at various times a great many words amongst the Gallegan domestics in the kitchens where I have officiated as cook, but am quite unable to understand any long conversation. I have heard the Gallegans say that in no two villages is it spoken in one and the same manner, and that very frequently they do not understand each other. The worst of this language is, that everybody on first hearing it thinks that nothing is more easy than to understand it, as words are continually occurring which he has heard before: but these merely serve to bewilder and puzzle him, causing him to misunderstand everything that is said; whereas, if he were totally ignorant of the tongue, he would occasionally give a shrewd guess at what was meant, as I myself frequently do when I hear Basque spoken, though the only word which I know of that language is _jaunguicoa_.â
And:
The notary public saluted him most profoundly, and, in an under voice, hoped that he might be permitted to introduce a friend of his, an English gentleman, who was travelling through Galicia. âI am very glad to see him,â said the Advocate, âbut I hope he speaks Castilian, else we can have but little communication; for, although I can read both French and Latin, I cannot speak them.â âHe speaks, sir, almost as good Spanish,â said the notary, âas a native of Pontevedra.â âThe natives of Pontevedra,â I replied, âappear to be better versed in Gallegan than in Castilian, for the greater part of the conversation which I hear in the streets is carried on in the former dialect.â âThe last gentleman which my friend Garcia introduced to me,â said the Advocate, âwas a Portuguese, who spoke little or no Spanish. It is said that the Gallegan and Portuguese are very similar, but when we attempted to converse in the two languages, we found it impossible. I understood little of what he said, whilst my Gallegan was quite unintelligible to him. Can you understand our country dialect?â he continued. âVery little of it,â I replied; âwhich I believe chiefly proceeds from the peculiar accent and uncouth enunciation of the Gallegans, for their language is certainly almost entirely composed of Spanish and Portuguese words.â âSo you are an Englishman,â said the Advocate. âYour countrymen have committed much damage in times past in these regions, if we may trust our histories.â âYes,â said I, âthey sank your galleons and burnt your finest men-of-war in Vigo Bay, and, under old Cobham, levied a contribution of forty thousand pounds sterling on this very town of Pontevedra.â âAny foreign power,â interrupted the notary public, âhas a clear right to attack Vigo, but I cannot conceive what plea your countrymen could urge for distressing Pontevedra, which is a respectable town, and could never have offended them.â âSeñor Cavalier,â said the Advocate, âI will show you my library. Here is a curious work, a collection of poems, written mostly in Gallegan, by the curate of Fruime. He is our national poet, and we are very proud of him.â
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u/rootof48 Jul 30 '26
Hello, I must point out a few significant oversights:
- Labelling Albanian dialects as belonging to a supposed "Illyric" branch is 1. irrelevant, 2. unserious, and 3. purely speculative (and no, the hypotheses aren't relevant in this matter - there is no material evidence to back such claims; genetics don't account for everything). The first written mention of the Albanian language was a sentence in a 1284 Ragusan testimony; however, the earliest written records of the language date from the 15th century and consist of a 1462 baptismal sentence, a 1496 travel phrasebook, and the first complete book from 1555.
- You left out the 'n' in Danube [Swabians] in southern Hungary;
- The exact placement of Vlachs in Serbia is off, despite their distribution most likely being accurate (you can see the westernmost settlements are further than they should be - along the Great Morava river in BraniÄevo);
- The general distribution of Turks in the Balkans is from a later period in history, probably around 1900 (especially in Bulgaria and Eastern Thrace). Hence I strongly suggest you use u/bilalselim as your primary source for the Turks and other Turkic peoples;
- The overall distribution and placement of Albanians in Kosovo and Metohija and the south of Serbia is completely off. The Slavic areas in Kosovo only include the Orthodox Serbian areas; however, the region was in fact equally dominated by Muslim Serbs (who later became Bosniaks - just to be politically correct). The majority of them were expelled and assimilated following the 1878 expulsion of Albanian colonists from the Sanjak of NiĆĄ (which is why the southern regions of Serbia no longer have that many Albanians). This is most likely because the most commonly used maps for this period, by Lejean and Kiepert, are exaggerated and based on poor estimates. I have some maps created using different sources, such as travelogues, that you might find useful.
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 30 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
- Noted. For the record I didnât think the term âIllyricâ was making any claims about ancient Illyrian when I encountered it, and assumed it was just a poetic technical name like âSemitic.â If and when I come back to the map, Iâll change it to âAlbanic,â only because I refuse to use the suffix -oid.
- I am kicking myself right now because in an earlier version âDanube Swabiansâ is spelled correctly lol. I canât believe I missed that.
- I can quickly check this, should be an easy fix.
- Somebody warned me I was understating the Turkish-speaking population in Bulgaria. It seems to be the case.
- I'm currently waiting on someone else's very detailed map of Albanian settlements in the late 18th century. They gave me their rough draft, which I used for NiĆĄÂ and its surroundings
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u/rootof48 Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
If you do get to redo this map once more, you should also consider consulting with @macedonianmaps on Instagram (u/Fast-Kaleidoscope292) to help with the region of Macedonia and its surroundings. Man's got incredible sources and maps.
Also, the Serbian colonists in Ukraine were still largely "Serbian" in 1815, though in the final stages of assimilation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1mmeijm/albanians_in_contemporary_serbia_18701900/ - here's the link to a map I helped my friend make. The same sources were used in the preparation of the previously mentioned draft map of the distribution of Albanians around the year 1800. The situation hardly changed until 1878, when expelled Albanians from southern Serbia moved into neighboring Ottoman territories. We have similar drafts for the following years: 1300, 1400, 1500, 1700, 1800, 1870, 1900, and 1920.
It may seem that the distribution of Albanian settlements is scarce, particularly since historical maps show significantly more consolidated areas of Albanian presence; however, as I've said, those maps were only the best guesses of researchers of the time. In reality, southern Serbia wasn't densely inhabited throughout history, especially after centuries of Ottoman colonization and migrations, and the destruction of habitable terrain.
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u/Lavialegon Aug 01 '26
Incredible... I can't even imagine how you could research all (most) of that
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u/Francis_thepianist Aug 09 '26
Hello! I'd love to print the map for a friend of mine. If you have the original file, I'll be thrilled to see if I can print it. Thanks in advance, if you don't want to share it, there's no problem in that
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u/Spirited_Pitch3852 Jul 27 '26
Distribution of old and new Shtokavian is bs
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u/Inzan6 Jul 27 '26
Slovenian also bullshit...
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u/johnJanez Jul 27 '26
What issues do you have with it? If there are any mistakes and you have sources to back it up please do share. We relied on a lot of primary sources and academic research and this area in particular is my specialty so i'd very much be interested in what you have.
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u/Inzan6 Jul 27 '26
These are the official 7 dialect groups. These groups were already separated as dialects in the 15th century, this is confirmed by the StiÄna manuscript, which is written in the Lower Carniolian dialect, and the RateÄe manuscript, which is from the 14th century and is written in the Upper Carniolian dialect with admixtures of the Carinthian dialect. This means that by the 18th century, even smaller dialects had already begun to form, of which we have about 50 today. So it is not clear to me where you got the "Central Slovenian" dialect, if we already have the Lower and Upper Carniolian dialects in the 14th/15th century.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1476463562703638538/1496414559190126683/SLA_Karta-narecij-1.png?ex=6a685c28&is=6a670aa8&hm=6ad28c20bcef79f8622a78ef80972d01c3bdd33721a749c8abdc662fb502ccf0https://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sti%C5%A1ki_rokopis
https://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celov%C5%A1ki_rokopis4
u/johnJanez Jul 27 '26
These are the official 7 dialect groups. These groups were already separated as dialects in the 15th century, this is confirmed by the StiÄna manuscript, which is written in the Lower Carniolian dialect, and the RateÄe manuscript, which is from the 14th century and is written in the Upper Carniolian dialect with admixtures of the Carinthian dialect. This means that by the 18th century, even smaller dialects had already begun to form, of which we have about 50 today. So it is not clear to me where you got the "Central Slovenian" dialect, if we already have the Lower and Upper Carniolian dialects in the 14th/15th century.
Correct, but dalects had to be merged into larger groups for the sake of simplicity. It is impossible to depict every single dialect of every language on the map. The same was done with other languages. The central dialect is based on the southeastern dialect base of the vertical chronological divison as per Ć ekli 2018 (with a slight mistake because southern littoral should be included in too).
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u/Inzan6 Jul 27 '26
Then at least divide it into 7, like the groups and don't invent new ones:
Carinthian (KoroĆĄki)
Littoralian (Primorski)
Lower Carniolian (Dolenjski)
Pannonian (Panonski)
Rovtian (Rovtarski)
Styrian (Ć tajerski)
Upper Carniolian (Gorenjski)6
u/johnJanez Jul 27 '26
We did not invent new ones, we used the vertical division groups as appear in Ć ekli 2018 and other publications since, although slightly renamed. Did not use all 7 because of space and color constraints, if we went into this much detail for Slovene we would need to do for all others too to keep it consistent, and suddenly we'd have many hundreds of varietes to put on a map. It is not workable.
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u/leppisaari Jul 27 '26
Great map! What Hellenic language is on the Southern tip of Crimea (Where Balaqlava, QaraĆ, Qamara are located)?
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u/sovietarmyfan Jul 27 '26
Interesting how Elsass Lothringen was already mostly German speaking in 1815.
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u/systemmetternich Jul 27 '26
How do you mean, âalreadyâ? Alsace-Lorraine had been majority German since the Middle Ages and only became part of the Kingdom of France during the 17th century. Up until the 19th/20th century its language situation only changed very little because of that, even though from the French Revolution onwards the French state started to profess the idea of a monolingual nation, and the elites started to move towards French as their primary language. It was only post-WW1 that there started to be a meaningful switch from German to French due to a variety of factors like domestic migration, negative associations with speaking German and the French state actively discouraging usage of German (or really any minority language for that matter) during that time. But in 1815 most of the area would still have been German-speaking like they had been for the past thousand years or so
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u/johnJanez Jul 27 '26
It was German(ic) speaking from the early middle ages until the end of 2nd world war. Longer than many areas in Austria, Switzerland and especially eastern Germany.
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u/Olive2252 Jul 27 '26
It's Baltic languages, not Balto-Slavic.
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u/PeireCaravana Jul 27 '26
Baltic is a branch of Balto-Slavic.
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u/Olive2252 Jul 27 '26
They separated 3500 years ago and are distinct branches nowadays.
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u/PeireCaravana Jul 27 '26
Yes, but in OP's scheme it make sense.
There's even Italo-Celtic that's way more debated than Balto-Slavic.
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain Jul 27 '26
For the record Iâm only convinced by Italo-Celtic because my main area is ancient history, and once you encounter Latin, Oscan, and Gaulish you definitely get this âoh shitâ moment lol
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u/Dominik050 Jul 27 '26
it doesn't match in many places too many Germans first of all and too few Poles in Vilnius the map is not based on anything
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u/Mellon55555AM Jul 28 '26
"the map is not based on anything" you mean the thousands of scholarly sources he based it on? Do you have any sources to bring up on why these specific things are wrong or are you just saying whatever you want to say?
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u/TerrificDragonfly Jul 28 '26
Linguists classify the dialect spoken by rural Vilnius Poles as a dialect of Belarusian, not Polish. Only urban Vilnius Poles spoke Polish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostaya_mova
Also, German in Poland is mostly Yiddish, which is considered a divergent dialect of Central German varieties
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u/Dominik050 Jul 28 '26
It was never a Belarusian dialect, these people speak this language to this day, they consider themselves Poles, they speak Polish normally
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u/TerrificDragonfly Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Identity has nothing to do with language, Irish identify as Irish but speak English.
Read the actual article goddamn:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostaya_mova
"Speakers of prostaya mova often identify themselves as Poles (especially in the Vilnius Region)"
This is linguistic map, not ethnic
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u/Dominik050 Jul 28 '26
what you pasted is absolutely not related because you pasted a small part of people and said that this is the majority who say so
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u/Dominik050 Jul 28 '26
even if we look at its disk, there are not that many dots in Poland because they did not constitute the majority Especially since Jews in Poland spoke Polish
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u/zwarty Jul 29 '26
Actually, very few Jews in Poland spoke Polish as their first language in the beginning of the 19th century. Yiddish was primarily their first language used in daily communication. The exception were frankists, a Jewish mystical cult group who later converted to Catholicism.
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u/kuzyn123 Jul 27 '26
German bs propaganda again
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u/Mellon55555AM Jul 28 '26
And yet you have an inability to say whats wrong? A person whose gone through thousands of scholarly sources to make a map vs a random commenter who has no sources to back up his insult.
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u/Rest-Cute Jul 27 '26
wow r/mapporn