Humans Who Read Grammars

In 2015 I wrote a blogpost about Alberto Lucas López visualisations of the worlds languages.  I answered some frequently asked questions in relation to that visualisation, mostly to do with Ethnologue's definitions of languages, macro-languages and speakers. There's a lot more context needed to fully understand that infographic, and every time I see if re-shared I see the same questions pop up. It's a good infographic, so I understand that it goes viral - but when the same questions come every time it means that more context is needed.  Since then, Alberto (who is now Senior Graphics Editor at the National Geographic) has released an updated version, which among other things fixes the color of Mexico.  I haven't gone through to check what else has been adjusted, but many of the same questions will remain. This is because Ethnologue's classification of what is and what is not a language (which still underlies the visualisation) is still controversial at times a...

Infographics time again! Last time it was that pretty graph from South China Morning post that had huge spread and lots of problems, see this post about that infographic and also this one about journalists, researchers and info graphics . This time we've got two infographics of "second languages of the countries of the world" using almost the same data - one by  the site MoveHub.com who works in international moving  and one  interactive map made by Olivet Nazarene University of countries second languages.  I'll go through some of the problems with these infographics, suggest some improvements and show some other neat relevant illustrations. If you have any questions or if you're a journalist interested in writing about the languages of the world and require assistance, don't hesitate to contact us. Both infographics features data from the CIA's World Factbook  - a US-run enterprise to provide information about the world for policym...

Hiya readers,  This is a post more about public outreach by scientists and journalism than linguistic diversity or description; please bear with me. _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ TL;DR: Journalists are producing more and more composite stories where infographics and fact sheets are being used as separate entities. The interest for the infographic of the world's languages that I made a post about is an example of this. The public's awareness of the world is being shaped more by media outlets and journalists and less by published academic papers, education and/or encyclopaedias. Many of these stories and facts require more context and background to make sense. There is a higher demand than before on consumers of information evaluating and judging the information.  Researchers are also becoming more interested in publicly accessible visualisations of their work. Journalists and researchers are very sim...

Have you seen this infographic ( click here for original post and larger size )? It's been floating around various linguistics blogs, been shared of 32 thousands times on the book of faces and been reblogged and retweeted in many other places.  I bet you found a flaw in it! Did you read the fine print and look up the sources (it's mostly from just this page )? No? It's ok. Allow me to give some explanation and context, as a diversity linguists working with public outreach - I'd like to take this chance to explain some things about data on languages of the world. © 2015 Alberto Lucas López, South China Morning Post  Publishers Ltd The international edition of the newspaper South China Morning Post (SCMP)  published this infographic of languages of the world  on the 27th of May and later updated it. SCMP is an English language newspaper based in Hong Kong. They have a great internet presence and have made several neat infographics  on other topics....