Page:Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.pdf/16

 Cartographic representation of the world’s endangered languages Christopher Moseley

The first edition of this Atlas was coordinated from the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra, by the late Professor S. A. Wurm. The school was in a unique position to record the location of languages graphically, as it had its own wellequipped cartographic department. Since then, however, there have been significant developments in the field of cartography as well as in the amount of linguistic data available. This third edition has adopted some essentially different methods of presenting a snapshot of the current state of language endangerment worldwide. The editorial team has given a great deal of thought as to whether the location of languages should be shown by means of polygons (or areas delimited by borders), accurately corresponding in scale to the territory occupied by the language, or, as in the previous editions, by single (or in some cases multiple) points. For both the online and the printed versions of this edition, we decided in the end to retain single points of a standard size. There are several reasons for this: first, many languages in danger of disappearing are characteristically spoken over a very restricted territory, often a steadily diminishing one. Second, the shape of a polygon would imply that surrounding language(s) also occupy a distinctly shaped territory, which, however, has been omitted from these maps. Third, this in turn implies a discrete monolingualism, which is unlikely to be the case. Speakers of endangered languages are usually forced by circumstances to become fluent in one or more majority languages, for communication with larger out-groups. Fourth, and consequently, this would require an overlap between the polygons to indicate multilingualism, which would detract from the impact of the single points, in many cases clustered together in complex areas of multiple endangerment.