One big difference between Asia and Europe, is that with Europe I could comfortably cover just about every language spoken as a majority in just about every given area. In Asia, thanks to factors including massive geographic barriers, great amounts of diversity and lower levels of education and thus survival of minority languages, there are several areas of smaller unrecognised languages that have been left grey.
Some areas have been simplified. For example, while people may assume that Israel=Hebrew-speaking, Palestine=Arabic-speaking, the truth is that Hebrew is spoken throughout the West Bank and Arabic is spoken in locations across the north of Israel. I cannot show all detail through this medium.
To generalise, Asian countries are less likely to have the same 'clear-cut' recognition of minority languages as their European counterparts. Some recognise dozens, while others recognise one. There is unavoidable subjectivity here.
English is actually the largest spoken language in Singapore and Christmas Island, however since it and Portuguese are not the majority first language anywhere in Asia, they are automatically filled in.
I tried to choose the flags that fit the language the best. I have done my best to avoid controversial flags, but if there are any flags of guerilla movements for whatever reason I will replace them.
I cannot show it on the map, but sadly many of these languages are in decline, and will soon be transparent (in the likes of Assyrian or Ainu) for a variety of factors including migration, modernisation, etc. (not saying these factors are bad, but rather have unfortunate consequences for the minority languages).
There is too much to say about the quiz, I hope I covered everything important! Will try and do one for the Americas next :)
Anyways, the only thing I would've done differently is change the Colonial Languages to the flags of their homeland (the UK and Portugal, respectively).
I was going to do that, but I decided to use the flag of the largest L1 communties going forward, gives a chance for some new 'Circle-Flags' to, well, circulate :)
Also the Chinese provinces don't have flags, unlike Indian states (all of which also don't have official flags in 2021) I believe it is illegal in China.
I was actually talking about Guangzhou, the city, but I looked back at the Wikipedia article and they removed the flag, probably due to its sketchy officialness.
I see. I ran into so many interesting flags while researching this quiz, but many resembled passion projects and individual creations (and some made their way onto Wikipedia). Some of the flags I used were historical, or otherwise not widespread today but I tried to avoid the sketchier looking ones!
Manchu is only official at the county level, so it wasn't included. For China I am only accepting languages recognised at the national or provincial level.
North/South America are mostly homogenous, especially since some of the most linguistically diverse countries (i.e. Mexico) don't recognise any languages on even the state level. Only Bolivia and Alaska have a variety of languages to guess.
As for Oceania, I never compiled a list of languages. New Guinea has the most languages by far although few on the island have recognition. Interestingly, Anguar State in Palau has Japanese as an official language. Only one person born on Anguar can speak Japanese, and he or she no longer resides in that state.
Thank you! This has been an ongoing project for some time now and I'm happy with how it turned out. A world version would be amazing, but for now it's just a dream. I would probably have to scrap a lot of the detail in order to make a world version (the map for this quiz was already approaching the 600 KB limit, for example).
Also, wouldn't Minnan / Southern Min be a better representation of Hokkien? I might be wrong, so please do correct me, but I think Hokkien is it's own thing. This is just something I would like to clarify and point out.
Yeah, and also I wouldn't call Teochew and Hainanese "Hokkien", but I would call them "Southern Min / Minnan". Because Minnan is a more generalised title that includes Teochew, Hainanese and Hokkien.
I see, and I just saw you edited your comment above. I don't mind changing the displayed name to 'Southern Min' (with Hokkien retained as a type-in, and Teochew and Hainanese as type-ins too) so long as it doesn't reset the quiz. I look into it myself, I believe I have confused those in the past so thanks for letting me know!
If we're being very pedantic, you can argue that Hokkien / Minnan is in effect the street language on much of Penang island in Malaysia, though that's perhaps far too much detail than people may need!
Don't tempt me to add that! I love detail so I've been restraining myself (so that the map doesn't have too many dots on it), although I already cracked and included Russian in Bishkek! :)
There are a lot of smaller indigenous languages in the hills. Keep in mind that the grey part of Vietnam doesn't have such a large population compared to the rest of the country.
Unfortunately, according to my research, Hmong is not recognised as an official language in any region. If it were I could add a whole new language family into the fray.
Strange, well I'm a little glad to hear that... I was beginning to question my memory when I saw your comment again and so I went and thanked you twice, haha.
Just wonderful! 5 stars and nominated. Really appreciate the explanations below too. Would be very happy to read more after all the research you've clearly done!
Thank you! I bet I could turn some of the things I've learnt into a blog post (after paper-season is over and my writer's bloc recovers). There is a lot to write about :)
The European languages one already blew my mind and when I came to know about the Asian Version, I was waiting for it all the time. It's a lot better than I expected and the map is astonishing. This one was rather easier than the European one maybe because I'm an Asian or maybe this one is easier in general.
I liked how you completely left New Guinea blank. The Siberian languages were the toughest where I got none, a lot of new languages as well I got to see for the first time in this quiz even in India. Didn't expect to see Ainu as it has a very small population speaking as their L1. It's sad how languages like Ainu will gradually go extinct and probably a lot of Indonesian and Indian languages too. Like approximately 20 languages were spoken in Andaman and the whole language family went extinct when the last L1 speaker died in 2009.
Happy to hear you liked it! I wasn't going to do Asia at first, but then I thought over it and after finishing my Indo-Aryan language quiz I became determined.
New Guinea is left blank since it is technically in Oceania, but I'm actually not sure any of those languages would be eligible other than Hiri Motu and Tok Pisin (which is simply an English Creole, its name derived from 'Talk Pidgin'). Bit of a shame from the world's most linguistically diverse region.
It is tragic the state of some language at the moment. I noticed how some of the language names in India used Latin alphabets, and that is often a sign that the language is not even written, only spoken. The way the cycle works, it seems people will only turn to language revitalisation when decline is too great and the language becomes a historical language only. Irish has been under revitalisation for over 100 years, and continues to decline at the L1 level. The major Indian state languages seem quite safe however.
I gave up with 60/149, thinking I didn't score well, but I managed the top 17 percentile, and I'll take it. I rarely score that well on languages.
Fantastic Quiz! Excellent Map Detail! When I first looked at Indonesia, Philippines, and Nepal, I'm like, can't be too hard right. And when I clicked show unguessed Language, the bruh moment came.
Haha, it is incredible how many languages can develop, in areas with geographic isolation like that. I actually had a hard time getting the dots overtop some of those languages, because of how small they were on the map!
Thanks for playing, and I'm glad you liked the quiz! I found it interesting to learn about the Batak languages too when researching this quiz, I hadn't heard about them prior :)
This quiz is very very interesting and fun. Would you consider including some local languages of Malaysian Borneo as well like (Kadazan & Dusun for Sabah and Iban for Sarawak?), since most of these regions of the island where they’re indigenous are left grey except for Malay in Sarawak. Although these languages aren’t official in both states, there are standardised varieties which are taught in national schools where those ethnicities form the majority.
Thank you very much! I will consider them, although there is a good chance the list here is finalised. I do think it's unfortunate that Borneo is mostly grey at this point. Malaysia is a country in which I could only add Malay from, since the status of the other languages seemed unclear/unofficial. On a side note I'm very happy to hear that those languages are taught in Sarawak and Sabah, that seems to be a rarity in many other linguistically diverse nations.
That is true, I had to make a note for myself so that I left them grey, to represent the languages there that couldn't be included on this quiz. I would like to include them in a future quiz, perhaps, they deserve the recognition.
Not at the moment, unfortunately. I was planning on doing North/South America seperately but some territories recognise tens of Indigenous languages, while others don't recognise even their main language (lloking at you, Mexico). This means that more than half the languages in North America would be Indigenous languages from Alaska (ditto Bolivia in South America). The map is mostly complete, however.
Africa or even Oceania would probably make for better quizzes :P
Thank you! It took a good amount of work and research but I feel it was worth it. I will accept Okinawan shortly, as it is one of the Ryukyuan languages.
After playing it at least ten times I can still remember 100 only, what a shame.
I can't even begin to guess what will happen when you get to Oceania. I see you want to do the Americas next, and that will also be interesting, but I'm in love with Oceanian literatures at the moment...
Thank you, I am glad that you are enjoying this! :D
Oceania is a region that I am interested in covering. Most of the languages are from the same language family, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be an interesting quiz.
Absolutely amazing! This is what I'm doing instead of paying attention to my chemistry class :') but it's worth it.
Two questions about this (one a question and one a suggestion):
1. In Nepal, Indonesia, and the Phillipines, how do nation-wide languages work? Like is it that everyone who doesn't speak the most prominent language (Nepali, Malay, Tagalog) as a first language learns it in school as a second language? Or is it more that they use colonial languages instead (English, Dutch, Spanish/English)?
2. For some reason, some of the labels of the language families don't show up while I take the quiz. For example, it didn't say "Tibetic," I just saw "1.7 million speakers." The problem resolved itself afterwards, but not during the quiz for some reason :/ I don't know if anyone else is having this problem but it might be worth looking into.
Thank you! I won't say anything, I play Jetpunk all the time during online lectures :)
To answer your comment,
1. It seems in those countries that the national language is used in school, alongside English. In Nepal they used to suppress some of the regional languages (such as Newari), but as a result of the Nepalese Civil War the Nepali language's exclusive use in government or courts is being challenged and regional languages are given rights (hence why they made it on this quiz!) When I was in Nepal, everyone could speak Nepali with me even if it was their second language, while English and Hindi were prevelant, but less spoken.
2. Don't worry, the labels are meant to be invisible at first. I hid the ones that gave away the names of individual languages' names. It's not a perfect solution by any means, but thankfully it's not a glitch either.
Thanks for the explanations! Although if you're trying to hide labels to avoid giving away answers, you might want to hide "Kiranti" as well, because I got "Sunuwar" based off of that :)
Thank you! Even today, Ainu heritage is often hidden due to shame. However, with more people embracing their heritage and culture it is completely possible that Ainu will live on. Cornish was extinct for many years, until there was renewed interesting in Cornish culture and identity, and now there are several fluent speakers and enthusiasts. It's not a perfect solution, but it's leagues better than the alternative.
That seems like quite the interesting language! I hadn't heard of it before, I may have confused them with the Hui people, who I am more familiar with.
I am undecided on that, to be honest an Americas quiz would have a huge amount of weight on Bolivian and Alaskan languages (probably over half of the quiz!)
Fabulous and challenging quiz, beautifully organised. There's something here for everyone to learn. Thank you Jiaoira! You obviously put a tonne of work into this!
No love for the Jewish Autonomous Oblast :( sure, hardly anyone there SPEAKS Yiddish, but it is still technically an official language! (still a great quiz, of course. i live in fear of the Oceania one - are you going to go for all 800-odd Papuan languages?)
Nice effort but I want to tell you that Formosan languages are not a language but a language family that consists more than 16 languages. Also, if you want to refer "Formosan languages" as Taiwanese indigenous languages (which I think is not right), then Yami language would have to be separated since Yami language is from the Batanic subgroup but not Formosan.
Same thing happens to the "Hokkien" languages. I think you are referred to the "Min language", but again, Min is actually a language family that consists of multiple languages.
Yes but Taiwan appears to recognise 'Formosan Languages' generally as a national language. Therefore the display name is 'Formosan Languages', and every single living Formosan Language is included as a type-in. I may change the display name of Hokkien to Min Chinese when I get the chance, maybe they are technically a 'language group', but the same can be said for other Chinese languages such as Mandarin.
If it was a quiz purely on Taiwanese languages, I would certainly go into much more detail. Thanks for letting me know about Yami by the way, it is not recognised in the same way, so I cannot include it, but I had no idea there was a Batanic language spoken in Taiwan!
I cannot agree with your statement that "but the same can be said for other Chinese languages such as Mandarin." since it is definitely not. Out of the seven groups of varieties of Chinese, Min is the only one that is considered to be a "language branch" by the linguisticians while the other six groups are a "language." Min has a much greater dialectal diversity than any of the other groups and is the only groups of varieties where their sub-languages (such as Southern Min, Pu-Xian, Northern Min, Eastern Min, Hainan...) are mutually unintelligible and that's why the sub-languages of Min should be considered distinct languages, as a native Southern Min speaker, I can tell you that this is definitely accurate. In contrast, the "sub-languages" of the other six groups of varieties of Chines are all mutually intelligible, that's why the "sub-languages" of these six groups are only dialects but not distinct languages. In conclusion, the language status of Min and Mandarin are not the same.
Also, for the part that you say that "Taiwan appears to recognise 'Formosan Languages' generally as a national language" is not accurate, from this website , you can see the 'Formosan Languages' are called "Indigenous languages" by the Taiwanese government since it includes Formosan Languages and the Yami language, and Taiwanese government generally display the name of "Indigenous languages" but not list out all 15 legal national languages is just out of simplicity basis, it does not mean that Taiwanese government recognize "Formosan languages" as a national language. Also, Matsu is also a national language of Taiwan accourding by Development of National Languages Act . Finally, extremely brilliant effort for the map that you have done and feel free to try my Languages of Taiwan quiz, this is a quiz purely on Taiwan
You are correct, I will change the title to something which includes Yami then. I will have to follow the same simplicity basis, for the sake of this quiz. I will have to figure out what to do with the Min languages, they don't appear to be recognised in China so I may grey out everything other than Hokkien on Taiwan, or perhaps I will change the name on the quiz. Changes will be a little slow, since I don't want to reset everyone's answer stats just yet. Thanks for playing and excellent quiz too! I just tried it out :D
Some scholars and earlier research would say that Hainanese is a dialect of the Hokkien (Southern Min) language, while more and more scholars think that Hainanese is an independent language nowadays since Southern Min and Hainanese is not mutually intelligible at all.
Hainanese should be considered its own language, the dialect/language distinction is more of a political definition than a linguistic one. Unfortunately, I have to go with the political definitions sometimes, for the sake of the quiz. I may make changes to the quiz, however, such as greying out that particular region on the map.
I have a version for the Americas which I almost finished, however I struggled with drawing some of the Indigenous languages / including both North and South America on one map so the project was put on hold.
As for now I have no plans to continue the series because of time constraints. If I could pick up the series again, I wish I could cover Africa next as it is the most fitting for this style of quiz!
I didn't think it would come so soon hahaha, the data comes from the Wikipedia pages for each country, if you look under 'language' they give you an idea what languages are official or recognised under different statuses (like minority languages).
Thank you for playing! Since Taiwan only appears to recognise 'Taiwanese Aboriginal Languages' more broadly, I found this to be the fairest response :)
Asterisks denote that only speakers in Asia are counted for L1 figures, while Indo-European language families are marked with a dagger (†)
Figures for the total speakers of each language family should be taken as estimations and do not include immigrant/'non-European' languages
One big difference between Asia and Europe, is that with Europe I could comfortably cover just about every language spoken as a majority in just about every given area. In Asia, thanks to factors including massive geographic barriers, great amounts of diversity and lower levels of education and thus survival of minority languages, there are several areas of smaller unrecognised languages that have been left grey.
Some areas have been simplified. For example, while people may assume that Israel=Hebrew-speaking, Palestine=Arabic-speaking, the truth is that Hebrew is spoken throughout the West Bank and Arabic is spoken in locations across the north of Israel. I cannot show all detail through this medium.
To generalise, Asian countries are less likely to have the same 'clear-cut' recognition of minority languages as their European counterparts. Some recognise dozens, while others recognise one. There is unavoidable subjectivity here.
English is actually the largest spoken language in Singapore and Christmas Island, however since it and Portuguese are not the majority first language anywhere in Asia, they are automatically filled in.
I tried to choose the flags that fit the language the best. I have done my best to avoid controversial flags, but if there are any flags of guerilla movements for whatever reason I will replace them.
I cannot show it on the map, but sadly many of these languages are in decline, and will soon be transparent (in the likes of Assyrian or Ainu) for a variety of factors including migration, modernisation, etc. (not saying these factors are bad, but rather have unfortunate consequences for the minority languages).
There is too much to say about the quiz, I hope I covered everything important! Will try and do one for the Americas next :)
Also the Chinese provinces don't have flags, unlike Indian states (all of which also don't have official flags in 2021) I believe it is illegal in China.
As for Oceania, I never compiled a list of languages. New Guinea has the most languages by far although few on the island have recognition. Interestingly, Anguar State in Palau has Japanese as an official language. Only one person born on Anguar can speak Japanese, and he or she no longer resides in that state.
EDIT: Also, one more thing, does Hokkien also include Teochew and Hainanese, because I think they're quite different.
Also accept Cebu for Cebuano?
I liked how you completely left New Guinea blank. The Siberian languages were the toughest where I got none, a lot of new languages as well I got to see for the first time in this quiz even in India. Didn't expect to see Ainu as it has a very small population speaking as their L1. It's sad how languages like Ainu will gradually go extinct and probably a lot of Indonesian and Indian languages too. Like approximately 20 languages were spoken in Andaman and the whole language family went extinct when the last L1 speaker died in 2009.
New Guinea is left blank since it is technically in Oceania, but I'm actually not sure any of those languages would be eligible other than Hiri Motu and Tok Pisin (which is simply an English Creole, its name derived from 'Talk Pidgin'). Bit of a shame from the world's most linguistically diverse region.
It is tragic the state of some language at the moment. I noticed how some of the language names in India used Latin alphabets, and that is often a sign that the language is not even written, only spoken. The way the cycle works, it seems people will only turn to language revitalisation when decline is too great and the language becomes a historical language only. Irish has been under revitalisation for over 100 years, and continues to decline at the L1 level. The major Indian state languages seem quite safe however.
Fantastic Quiz! Excellent Map Detail! When I first looked at Indonesia, Philippines, and Nepal, I'm like, can't be too hard right. And when I clicked show unguessed Language, the bruh moment came.
Africa or even Oceania would probably make for better quizzes :P
After playing it at least ten times I can still remember 100 only, what a shame.
I can't even begin to guess what will happen when you get to Oceania. I see you want to do the Americas next, and that will also be interesting, but I'm in love with Oceanian literatures at the moment...
Oceania is a region that I am interested in covering. Most of the languages are from the same language family, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be an interesting quiz.
Would you mind accepting Aceh for Acehnese, Altay for Altai, Iloko for Ilocano, Panjabi for Punjabi, and Winaray for Waray?
Two questions about this (one a question and one a suggestion):
1. In Nepal, Indonesia, and the Phillipines, how do nation-wide languages work? Like is it that everyone who doesn't speak the most prominent language (Nepali, Malay, Tagalog) as a first language learns it in school as a second language? Or is it more that they use colonial languages instead (English, Dutch, Spanish/English)?
2. For some reason, some of the labels of the language families don't show up while I take the quiz. For example, it didn't say "Tibetic," I just saw "1.7 million speakers." The problem resolved itself afterwards, but not during the quiz for some reason :/ I don't know if anyone else is having this problem but it might be worth looking into.
To answer your comment,
1. It seems in those countries that the national language is used in school, alongside English. In Nepal they used to suppress some of the regional languages (such as Newari), but as a result of the Nepalese Civil War the Nepali language's exclusive use in government or courts is being challenged and regional languages are given rights (hence why they made it on this quiz!) When I was in Nepal, everyone could speak Nepali with me even if it was their second language, while English and Hindi were prevelant, but less spoken.
2. Don't worry, the labels are meant to be invisible at first. I hid the ones that gave away the names of individual languages' names. It's not a perfect solution by any means, but thankfully it's not a glitch either.
"You just ruined my family's entire vacation"
"GIVE ME YOUR NINTENDO SWITCH YOUR TOO OLD FOR SILLY VIDEO GAMES ANYWAY"
"You will hear from my lawyers!"
I think I spend too much time on r/entitledparents...
That being said, I'm not touching it with a ten foot pole... ;-)
I don't blame you either, it isn't exactly a free 5 points :)
Glad to hear you enjoyed rediscovering it! :D
Same thing happens to the "Hokkien" languages. I think you are referred to the "Min language", but again, Min is actually a language family that consists of multiple languages.
If it was a quiz purely on Taiwanese languages, I would certainly go into much more detail. Thanks for letting me know about Yami by the way, it is not recognised in the same way, so I cannot include it, but I had no idea there was a Batanic language spoken in Taiwan!
I can fully understand that they are an immense lot of work to make, I'm just asking... please, if possible. :)
Happy new year, by the way!
I have a version for the Americas which I almost finished, however I struggled with drawing some of the Indigenous languages / including both North and South America on one map so the project was put on hold.
As for now I have no plans to continue the series because of time constraints. If I could pick up the series again, I wish I could cover Africa next as it is the most fitting for this style of quiz!