Language Tapestries
A visualization of the world's language diversity, one swatch per country.
Every language carries a distinct way of thinking, perceiving, and naming the world. When one disappears, it isn't only a vocabulary that's lost: it's a mode of attention, a set of relationships, a way of being in a place. Globally, an average of six languages go extinct each year, never to be spoken again. Within the United States alone, 94% of the languages indigenous to the country are at risk of vanishing.
What does the world lose when it loses a language?
The data visualization
Language Tapestries approaches this question through visual metaphor. Each swatch depicts the language profile of one country, imagined as a small piece of woven cloth. Every thread represents one language, its color mapped to that language's vitality on a six-point scale — from bright green (institutional, actively taught and governed in) through progressively darker shades to black (extinct). Because each swatch is kept the same size, the threads run finer in countries where many languages are spoken, and much thicker in countries with few. The combined effect of color tone and weaving density becomes a portrait: at a glance, the linguistic landscape of a place.
The complete series comprises 234 individual weavings, the complete global language landscape as it stood in 2013 according to field research compiled by the SIL International and published at Ethnologue.
| Year | 2014 |
|---|---|
| Materials | Custom Java parsing + visualization software; colour prints mounted on wood blocks |