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That infographic on languages of the world - some context to help you understand what's going on

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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....
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A Global Tree of Languages

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I was a reviewer for the Evolution of Language (Evolang) conference for the first time this year, a tedious-sounding task that turned out to be hilarious.  The conference attracts some bizarre manuscripts on the origins of language, one particularly imaginative one I wanted to devote a blogpost to, but regretfully cannot because of reviewer confidentiality. Also in my inbox to review was the most exciting paper about language that I’d ever seen.  I recommended acceptance obviously, even though it was only tangentially related to the theme of the conference, and it was accepted as a poster and published in the conference proceedings (available here ).  The paper was by Gerhard Jäger and Søren Wichmann, about constructing a world family tree of languages using a database of basic vocabulary, the ASJP database .  Claims about how language families may be related are nothing new but are normally statistically uninformed (such as work by Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Gr...
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Language family maps

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Last week, I assigned Bernhard Comrie's (2017) chapter 'The Languages of the World' (from The Handbook of Linguistics, 2017) to a class. It's a basic overview of the world's language families, which is what I wanted them to read, but for one thing: there are no maps in it. I overcompensated in class by presenting a 30-item list of maps, because some things are just so much easier to understand using visual representations. I decided to post some of the best ones I could find here, for future reference and in order to invite you to post better ones in the comments. This blog has featured posts on maps before, by  Hedvig on how to best represent linguistic diversity on maps and by  Matt on new approaches to ethnographies-linguistic maps . It's clear that the kind of maps that are typically used to depict the spatial distribution of languages of a single language family are fraught with difficulties. Typically they deal with multilingualism very poorly, the data...
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