Language Tapestries is a data visualization project that explores the health of language diversity among countries. With every language comes a kind of culture and a very particular way of thinking, perceiving, and expressing. Yet in the face of a few dominant languages, hundreds of these unique channels for inventing and understanding are disappearing. Within the United States alone, 94% of the languages spoken today are at risk of being entirely lost within the country, perhaps within our lifetimes. Many of them were brought here from abroad, so will go on living elsewhere. Some of them weren’t, and won’t. Globally an average of six languages each year go entirely extinct, never to be spoken again. How can we even imagine what that loss means?
Each of these images, conceptualized as a small swatch of woven cloth, represents the language profile for an individual country. Every one of the threads composing this metaphorical weaving stands in for a language, its color corresponding to the health of that language on a six-point scale of black (extinct) through bright green (what is coined “institutional”). Since each swatch is kept the same size, the individual threads will be smaller in countries where many languages are spoken, and much larger in countries with less language diversity. The combined effect of colour tone and weaving density offers a snapshot view of the language landscape of a country.
The complete set of Language Tapestries comprises 234 individual weavings depicting the global language landscape in 2013. The data was assembled from the online resources of Ethnologue, based on field research compiled annually by SIL International.
