1. The History of Language Mapping

There are a number of language atlases that not only provide collections of maps but information on the pronunciation of specific words in specific areas as well. The earliest such atlas was the Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches by Georg Wenker and Ferdinand Wrede, published at the beginning of 1888, followed by the Atlas Linguistique de la France by Jules Gilliéron between 1902 and 1910, and the AIS - Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz by Karl Jaberg and Jakob Jud, published between 1928 and 1940 (Navigais - AIS digital navigable version). The first American Linguistic Atlas Project was launched by Hans Kurath in 1929 (Kretzschmar, 2007). WALS (the World Atlas of Language Structure) is an on-line language atlas, which portrays a large collection of structural properties of language, i.e. phonological, lexical, and grammatical etc., which is gathered from descriptive material. LL-MAP (the Language and Location - Map Accessibility Project) is a joint project of Eastern Michigan University and Stockholm University, in collaboration with several projects and archives in the USA, Europe, and Australia. As is stated on their website, “[t]he most important part of the project is a language subsystem, which relates geographical information on the area in which a language is or has been spoken to data on resources relevant to the language.” The most attractive feature of this mapping project is that one can create one's own map on this website. LAP (the Linguistic Atlas Project) consists of a set of survey research projects about the words and pronunciation of everyday American English, the largest project of its kind in the country. The TELSUR PROJECT is a survey of linguistic changes in progress in North American English and the creator of Atlas of North America [ANAE]. LAMSAS is a linguistic atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States, directed by William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., the author of chapter 3. It is based on a 104 page questionnaire and the data was collected during the years 1933 to 1974 from 1162 informants. Currently a good amount of the data of this atlas has been digitized and is available on-line.

The invention of the computer has become an important asset in the area of linguistic mapping as well, since computers offer quick processing speed for the analysis of data, and highly interactive and attractive visualization options. Moreover, the support of Internet technology has greatly facilitated the management of map data, collaboration among linguists, and the sharing of maps. However, computer mapping of language data faces the big challenge that linguists are usually not experts in computer programming. Therefore, the successful adoption of computers to support mapping depends on the facilitated usability of the mapping software and tools.

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