25 Maps That Explain The English Language - Vox

25 maps that explain the English language - Vox
25 maps that
explain the English
language
by Libby Nelson on March 3, 2015
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English is the language of Shakespeare and the language of Chaucer. It's spoken in dozens of
countries around the world, from the United States to a tiny island named Tristan da Cunha. It
reflects the influences of centuries of international exchange, including conquest and
colonization, from the Vikings through the 21st century. Here are 25 maps and charts that
explain how English got started and evolved into the differently accented languages spoken
today.
The origins of English

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http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Minna Sundberg

Where English comes from

English, like more than 400 other languages, is part of the Indo-European language family,
sharing common roots not just with German and French but with Russian, Hindi, Punjabi,
and Persian. This beautiful chart by Minna Sundberg, a Finnish-Swedish comic artist,
shows some of English's closest cousins, like French and German, but also its more
distant relationships with languages originally spoken far from the British Isles such as
Farsi and Greek.
phillybdizzle

Where Indo-European languages are spoken in Europe

today
Saying that English is Indo-European, though, doesn't really narrow it down much. This
map shows where Indo-European languages are spoken in Europe, the Middle East, and
South Asia today, and makes it easier to see what languages don't share a common root
with English: Finnish and Hungarian among them.

Notuncurious
The Anglo-Saxon migration

Here's how the English language got started: After Roman troops withdrew from Britain in
the early 5th century, three Germanic peoples — the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes — moved
in and established kingdoms. They brought with them the Anglo-Saxon language, which

combined with some Celtic and Latin words to create Old English. Old English was first
spoken in the 5th century, and it looks incomprehensible to today's English-speakers. To
give you an idea of just how different it was, the language the Angles brought with them
had three genders (masculine, feminine, and neutral). Still, though the gender of nouns has
fallen away in English, 4,500 Anglo-Saxon words survive today. They make up only about
1 percent of the comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary, but nearly all of the most
commonly used words that are the backbone of English. They include nouns like "day" and
"year," body parts such as "chest," arm," and "heart," and some of the most basic verbs:
"eat," "kiss," "love," "think," "become." FDR's sentence "The only thing we have to fear is
fear itself" uses only words of Anglo-Saxon origin.

Hel-hama
The Danelaw

The next source of English was Old Norse. Vikings from present-day Denmark, some led
by the wonderfully named Ivar the Boneless, raided the eastern coastline of the British
Isles in the 9th century. They eventually gained control of about half of the island. Their
language was probably understandable by speakers of English. But Old Norse words were
absorbed into English: legal terms such as "law" and "murder" and the pronouns "they,"
"them," and "their" are of Norse origin. "Arm" is Anglo-Saxon, but "leg" is Old Norse; "wife"
is Anglo-Saxon," but "husband" is Old Norse.
Javierfv1212
The Norman Conquest

The real transformation of English — which started the process of turning it into the
language we speak today — came with the arrival of William the Conqueror from

Normandy, in today's France. The French that William and his nobles spoke eventually
developed into a separate dialect, Anglo-Norman. Anglo-Norman became the language of
the medieval elite. It contributed around 10,000 words, many still used today. In some
cases, Norman words ousted the Old English words. But in others, they lived side by side
as synonyms. Norman words can often sound more refined: "sweat" is Anglo-Saxon, but
"perspire" is Norman. Military terms (battle, navy, march, enemy), governmental terms
(parliament, noble), legal terms (judge, justice, plaintiff, jury), and church terms (miracle,
sermon, virgin, saint) were almost all Norman in origin. The combination of Anglo-Norman
and Old English led to Middle English, the language of Chaucer.
Olaf Simons
The Great Vowel Shift

If you think English spelling is confusing — why "head" sounds nothing like "heat," or why
"steak" doesn't rhyme with "streak," and "some" doesn't rhyme with "home" — you can
blame the Great Vowel Shift. Between roughly 1400 and 1700, the pronunciation of long
vowels changed. "Mice" stopped being pronounced "meese." "House" stopped being
prounounced like "hoose." Some words, particularly words with "ea," kept their old
pronounciation. (And Northern English dialects were less affected, one reason they still
have a distinctive accent.) This shift is how Middle English became modern English. No
one is sure why this dramatic shift occurred. But it's a lot less dramatic when you consider
it took 300 years. Shakespeare was as distant from Chaucer as we are from Thomas
Jefferson.
The spread of English

PinPin
The colonization of America

The British settlers coming to different parts of America in the 17th and 18th centuries
were from different regional, class, and religious backgrounds, and brought with them
distinctive ways of speaking. Puritans from East Anglia contributed to the classic Boston
accent; Royalists migrating to the South brought a drawl; and Scots-Irish moved to the
Appalaichans. Today's American English is actually closer to 18th-century British English in
pronunciation than current-day British English is. Sometime in the 19th century, British
pronunciation changed significantly, particularly whether "r"s are pronounced after vowels.

Lencer
Early exploration of Australia

Many of the first Europeans to settle in Australia, beginning in the late 1700s, were
convicts from the British Isles, and the Australian English accent probably started with their
children in and around Sydney. Australia, unlike the US, doesn't have a lot of regional
accents. But it does have many vocabulary words borrowed from Aboriginal languages:
kangaroo, boomerang, and wombat among them.

Metro News
Canada
British Loyalists flooded into Canada during the American Revolution. As a result,
Canadian English sounds a lot like American English, but it's maintained many of the "ou"
words from its British parent (honour, colour, valour). There's also some uniquely Canadian
vocabulary, many of which is shown in this word cloud. Canada is undergoing a vowel shift
of its own, where "milk" is pronounced like "melk" by some speakers. But unlike British and
American English, which has a variety of regional accents, Canadian English is fairly
homogenous.
10

Maps of India
English in India
The British East India Company brought English to the Indian subcontinent in the 17th

century, and the period of British colonialism established English as the governing
language. It still is, in part due to India's incredible linguistic diversity. But languages from
the subcontinent contributed to English, too. The words "shampoo," "pajamas," "bungalow,"
"bangle," and "cash" all come from Indian languages. The phrase "I don't give a damn"
was once speculated to refer to an Indian coin. This probably isn't true — the Oxford
English Dictionary disagrees — but it shows that language exchange during the colonial
era was a two-way street.
11
varp

Tristan da Cunha
Tristan da Cunha is the most remote archipelago in the world: it's in the South Atlantic
Ocean, more or less halfway between Uruguay and South Africa. It's also the furthest-flung
locaction of native English speakers. Tristan da Cunha is part of a British overseas
territory, and its nearly 300 residents speak only English. Tristan da Cunha English has a
few unusual features: double negatives are common, as is the use of "done" in the past
tense ("He done walked up the road.")
English around the world

12
Shardz
Countries with English as the official language

Fifty-eight countries have English as an official language. This doesn't include most of the
biggest English-speaking countries — the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom

don't have official languages. This map shows where English is either the official or the
dominant language. Particularly in Africa, it also doubles as a fairly accurate map of British
colonial history.
13
Jakub Marian
Which countries in Europe can speak English

English is one of the three official "procedural languages" of the European Union. The
president of German recently suggested making it the only official language. But how well

people in each European Union country speak English varies considerably. This map
shows where most people can — and can't — have an English conversation.
14
Kobolen
Where people read English Wikipedia

English dominated in the early days of the Internet. But languages online are getting more
diverse. In 2010, English no longer made up the majority of the text written online, as
advancements in technology made it easier for non-Roman alphabets to be displayed. Still,
English is the dominant language of Wikipedia — both when you consider the language
articles are written in, and where people use the English-language version, as is shown in
this map.
15

Oxford English Dictionary
Where new English words come from

This fascinating chart based on data from the Oxford English Dictionary shows where
words originally came from when they first started to appear in English. Most words come
originally from Germanic languages, Romance languages, or Latin, or are formed from
English words already in use. But as this screenshot from 1950 shows, words also come to
English from all over the world.
16

Mike Kinde
How vocabulary changes based on what you're writing

Borrowing words from other language didn't stop when Old English evolved into Middle
English. The Enlightenment brought an influx of Greek and Latin words into English —

words for scientific concepts that moved into broader use as science developed. Scientific
vocabulary is still usually based on Greek or Latin roots that aren't used in ordinary
conversation. On the other hand, Mark Twain, master of the American dialect, relied
heavily on good old Anglo-Saxon words in his work, a reflection of the endurance of those
very old words for the most ordinary concepts in everyday life.
17
Matt Daniels
Vocabulary of Shakespeare vs. rappers

Designer Matt Daniels looked at the first 35,000 words of artists' rap lyrics — and the first
35,000 words of Moby-Dick, along with 35,000 words from Shakespeare's plays — to
compare the size of their vocabularies. He found that some have bigger vocabularies than
Shakespeare or Melville. Of course, vocabulary size isn't the only measure of artistry. But
it's an interesting look at how English has changed.

Learning English as a second (or third) language

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EF
Where English learners speak the language proficiently

English is the second most-spoken language in the world. But there are even more people
learning English (secondary speakers) than people who claim English as their first
language. Here's where people tend to score well and poorly on tests of English from

Education First. Green and blue countries have higher proficiency levels than red, yellow
and orange ones. Scandinavian countries, Finland, Poland, and Austria fare best. The
Middle East generally lacks proficient English speakers.
19
R-Chan
Scores on the Test of English as a Foreign Language

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) is required for foreign students from
non-English-speaking countries to enroll at American universities, among other things.
Here's where students tend to perform well. (English-speaking countries are included on
the map, but the test is only required for people for whom English is not a first language.)
The Netherlands gets the top score: an average of 100 points out of a possible 120.
20

Claude S. Fischer, Mike Hout, Aliya Saperstein
Immigrants to the US are learning English more quickly

than previous generations
Concerns about whether immigrants are assimiliating in the US often focus on criticisms
that they're not learning English quickly enough (think of outrage over phone systems that
ask you to select English or Spanish). But in fact immigrants to the US today are learning
and using English much more quickly than immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. More
than 75 percent of all immigrants, and just less than 75 percent of Spanish-speaking
immigrants, speak English within the first five years, compared to less than 50 percent of
immigrants between 1900 and 1920.

Dialects and regionalisms

21
MutleyBG
Where Cockneys come from

The traditional definition of a Cockney in London is someone born within earshot of the
bells of St.-Mary-le-Bow church -- the area highlighted in tan on this map. (The smaller
circles within it are where the bells can be heard more loudly in the noisier modern world.)
The distinctive Cockney accent or dialect is best known for its rhyming slang, which dates
back to at least the 19th century. The slang starts as rhymes, but often the rhyming word is
dropped — "to have a butcher's," meaning "to take a look," came from the rhyming of
"butcher's hook" with "look." The phrase "blow a raspberry" — which has spread far beyond
London — originally comes from the rhyming of "raspberry tart" with "fart.")

22
Siobhan Thompson/Anglophenia
Dialects and accents in Britain

There are three general types of British accents in England: Northern English, Southern
English, and the Midlands accent. One of the most obvious features is whether "bath" is
pronounced like the a in "cat" (as it is in the US and in Northern English dialects) or like
the a in "father" (as it is in Southern English dialects). The generic British accent,
meanwhile, is known as "Received Pronunciation," which is basically a Southern English
accent used among the elite that erases regional differences. Here's a video of one woman
doing 17 British accents, most of which are shown on the map.
23

Angr
North American vowel shift

There's another vowel shift going on in American English right now. In the Great Lakes
region, short vowel sounds are changing. This is remarkable because short vowel sounds
(think of the short "a" in "cat," rather than the long a in "Kate") actually survived the Great
Vowel Shift in the 17th century. Short vowel sounds haven't changed for hundreds of years
— but now they are, in Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, and other cities and even small
towns around the Great Lakes, at least among white speakers. "Buses" is pronounced like
"bosses." "Block" comes out like "black." Nobody's sure why, but it appears to have started
as long ago as the 1930s. The map shows which areas have adopted various stages of
the vowel shift.
24

Robert Delaney
American dialects
Here's a detailed map of how Americans talk. The bright green dialects are all subsets of
"general Northern" — a generic American accent used by about two-thirds of the US,
according to linguist Robert Delaney, who built this map. But it includes many subsets. The
Eastern New England accent is the "pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd" accent. In the South,
you can see how English has and hasn't changed over generations. The South Midland
accent retains some words from Elizabethan English. And the Coastal Southern accent
retains some colonial vocabulary, like "catty-corner."
25

Joshua Katz
You guys vs. y'all

One thing that English lost over time is the useful second-person plural. "You" became
standard sometime in the 1500s, and unlike French (which differentiates between talking to
one person and talking to several, and between talking to someone you're intimate with
and someone you're not), it's pretty much a catchall. But American English has found
plenty of ways to fill the gap. There's the Southern "y'all," the Pittsburghian "yinz," and the
Bostonian "youse." Here's how people in the US address more than one person, from the
invaluable dialect maps from North Carolina State's Joshua Katz.

Learn more
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Credits
Writer Libby Nelson
Editors Sarah Kliff, Max Fisher
Developer Yuri Victor
Copy editor Ann Espuelas
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 TWEET (2,933)  SHARE +

The origins of English

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Where English comes from

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Where Indo-European languages are spoken in Europe

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

The Anglo-Saxon migration

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

The Norman Conquest

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

The Great Vowel Shift

The spread of English

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

The colonization of America

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Early exploration of Australia

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

English around the world

Countries with English as the official language

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Which countries in Europe can speak English

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Where people read English Wikipedia

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Oxford English Dictionary

Where new English words come from

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

How vocabulary changes based on what you're writing

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Vocabulary of Shakespeare vs. rappers

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Learning English as a second (or third) language

Where English learners speak the language proficiently

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Scores on the Test of English as a Foreign Language

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Claude S. Fischer, Mike Hout, Aliya Saperstein

Immigrants to the US are learning English more quickly

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Dialects and regionalisms

Where Cockneys come from

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

Dialects and accents in Britain

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

North American vowel shift

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

You guys vs. y'all

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english[3/16/2015 10:05:12 AM]

40 maps that explain the Middle East

Editors Sarah Kliff, Max Fisher

Developer Yuri Victor

Copy editor Ann Espuelas

v1.4, January 1, 2015 / Terms of Use / Privacy Policy