There are approximately 7,000 languages believed to be spoken around the world. Despite this diversity, the majority of the world’s population speaks only a fraction of these languages. The three largest language groups (Mandarin, Spanish, and English) are spoken by more than 1.5 billion people. Other estimates state that 2/3 of the world’s population share only 12 languages.
But it is the diversity of the languages spoken by the few that makes language a remarkable cultural phenomenon. It is estimated that about 96 per cent of the languages are spoken by only 3 to 4 per cent of the people. 2,000 of the world’s languages have less than 1,000 native speakers.
Tag Archives: culture
World Heritage
April 18th marks the International Day for Monuments and Sites declared by UNESCO in 1983. Most important element in UNESCO’s efforts in preserving the world’s cultural and natural heritage are the currently 1031 World Heritage Sites around the world managed by the World Heritage Centre. The following cartogram shows the global distribution of all sites, as well as splitting these by category in the smaller sized maps below the main map (802 cultural sites, 197 natural sites and 32 described as mixed properties):
Eurovision 2013 revisited
Year after year in May Europe meets to celebrate one common guilty pleasure: the Eurovision Song Contest. More important in the outcome than watching the singing performances is the voting procedure: It sometimes appears as if points are not always related to the performance, but a reflection of European history and current events. That makes it interesting for detailed analyses (such as this detailed one by students of the Technical University of Denmark) regardless of whether one agrees with the quality and style of the contributions. The upcoming song contest takes place in Copenhagen, as Denmark was last years winner which can be seen in the following map of the total votes that each country received in the 2013 contest (see the bottom of this post):
Total Points received by each country
(click for larger version)
But there is more to the results than the overall picture of the votes (Sidenote and warning: This blog post has a large number of maps embedded and may take longer to load up when viewing). Continue reading
European Identities: The 2013 Eurovision song contest
The Eurovision song contest voting patterns is a popular theme for the analysis of European identity and culture. In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (September 2013, Volume 4, Issue 2) Dimitris Ballas, Danny Dorling and I looked at the voting patterns of this year’s contest that was held in Malmö (Sweden). It has long been argued that there are clear patterns based on geographical region as well as cultural and linguistic bonds and there has typically been labelling of groups of countries that give their votes to each other as ‘blocs’ such as the ‘Scandinavian bloc’, the ‘Mediterranean’, ‘Western’, ‘Eastern’, ‘Scandinavian’, the ‘Balkan’ bloc etc. It can also be argued that political considerations may also affect these voting patterns and this may be particularly interesting in the recent Eurovision song context with voting patterns possibly influenced by the on-going political and economic crisis in the European Union (EU). This map series puts a focus on those countries being closely associated with the EU, either by being current members or official candidate member states (or official potential candidate for EU accession) and/or signed up to any of the following agreements: European Economic Area, the Schengen Zone, the European Monetary Union. The maps are based on European states that currently meet at least one of these criteria, leaving the remaining participants of the song contest aside.
