outline maps the world mcdonald publishing co

If we zoom in on a particular area, such as the Bay of Naples, you can see that if I click on a dot or star, you get some additional information about the languages and the time periods when they appear. Stars show sites where there is more than one language present (at any period, not necessarily at the same time). Dots show sites where that language is present. On this map, every colour represents a different language (more or less). Google maps is fairly handy for this kind of thing – here’s a screenshot of what all that information looks like: Languages of Italy c. Step two was getting all that information onto a map. Fortunately, I’d done a lot of that work for previous research anyway. There’s no one book that has this information, so it takes a certain amount of time to collate the information from lots of different sources. The first task was to create a spreadsheet (or rather, a lot of spreadsheets…) which gave the locations and dates of all the inscriptions in Italy. Until recently, I’ve contented myself with complaining about existing maps – but I’ve realised that for my Language Contact in Ancient Italy project, just poking holes in other people’s work is not going to be sufficient any more. But otherwise, it has the same problems as the first map – large areas each given one language, with no clear evidence of contact or change over time. It also leaves some blank space in places, where there’s little or no evidence. This kind of map is more honest to some extent, since it gives a general impression of where each language is found without suggesting that we know exactly where the borders between languages. Some of my colleagues prefer to use maps that looks something like this instead: If we’re not careful, the map also gives the impression that these boundaries were static and unchanging – who would guess from this map, for example, that Etruscan extended down to Campania at its greatest extent? It also buys into the Roman idea of large ‘tribes’ speaking the same language across wide areas, rather than individual communities and city states each doing their own thing.

The map gives the impression that there are clear borders between the languages, and that there was no bilingualism or language contact. But – as I’m sure everyone is getting tired of hearing me say – there are some problems here too. It gives a rough indication of the location and extent of the languages of ancient Italy, taking a point around the fifth or fourth century. Now, this map does the job in many circumstances. The map that I normally use is from Wikipedia, and looks like this: Map: Dbachmann. It’s become a bit of a cliche for me that my academic talks tend to start with a map of the languages of Italy, followed by an explanation of why the map is dangerously misleading.

Outline maps the world mcdonald publishing co