Language Landscape: A digital platform for mapping languages

Abstract

Language Landscape (LL) is a non-profit organization set up by a group of postgraduate linguistics students in 2011. It comprises of an interactive online map (languagelandscape.org), which is the main focus of this article, and educational outreach projects. The LL Mapping model relies not on representing languages per se, but rather on using instances of language use as data points. This method can be particularly useful for mapping language variation and multilingualism, especially in urban contexts. Through digitization, LL reaches a wide audience of educators, primary and secondary school students, university students, academic researchers, minority and endangered language communities and finally, social media users.