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[edit] Base colouring on how scripts work

To avoid having too many colours on the map, I suggest the following:

  1. Use a single colour theme for all writing systems of a structural type (how a script works) – ignoring genealogic relation, because the structure will be easier to determine.
    For example, shades of grey for abugidas, shades of orange for syllabaries.
  2. Within the writing systems of a type, try to find one or more scripts that both cover a large area and are genealogically closely related (of course, this doesn't imply any genealogic relation between their languages).
    Example 1: If you find that abugidas of the Brahmic family in the narrowest sense clearly dominate abugida territory, you make one shade of grey for Brahmic family abugidas and another shade for all other abugidas.
    Example 2: In the same manner, you would have three hues of colour X (alphabets): one for Latin alphabets (Great Britain, Vietnam etc.), a second one for Cyrillic (Outer Mongolia, Macedonia etc.) and a third one shared by all other alphabets such as Korean, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, and perhaps Ol Chiki and Mongolian if they are dominant in some areas.

Wikipeditor 01:07, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the map was designed to have a color theme per structural type.

  • Alphabets: blue - gray - black
  • Abjads: green
  • Abugidas: yellow - orange - brown
  • Logographic and/or syllabary: red - pink

It appears to me that it is easy to read structural type from the color scheme, with the possible exception of black for Georgia-Armenia. If there are not more than 4 structural types, it's not necessary to compress each type into a single color such as "blue", but can spread a type over related colors for better contrast.

Yes, you could for example lump Ethiopic and Thaana together as "other abugida" and give them the same color. But for readers who are not familiar with those scripts in the first place, a unique color helps to locate where the script is used.

BTW, an unstated assumption in the map is that it shows only official or dominant languages of whole countries, and it works pretty well as such; subregions of large countries like India and China might make sense, but I wouldn't go much further than that. If we want to get into minority, obscure, or historical scripts, we should have a separate map or maps for that, probably at larger scale. --JWB 20:27, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't think the Latin Alphabet area, or any area for that matter, should be gray. Gray is the default color for null areas, so, at first glance, it looks like there is no writing system at all in the Americas and Europe. I'm not sure what color it should be though. We already have a lot of shades of blue, and black wouldn't work very well either. -Tea and crumpets 20:07, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Areas with several systems vs. areas with a single mixed-script system

If somebody can do it, it would be nice to graphically reflect the difference between

  • situations where there are several writing systems in an area, either
    • where there are several languages with a similar number of speakers in an area, each with a different writing system, or
    • where more than one writing system is used in the area of a single language (for example, Tatar and Serbian [and some Central Asian languages, perhaps?] are written in Cyrillic and Latin, but never mixed), vs.
  • situations where there is one writing system which makes use of several scripts (for example, Japanese is written in Kana and Kanji which are usually mixed).

Perhaps this can be done by hatching colours in the first case(s) vs. using a middle hue in the second case? Wikipeditor 01:05, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

The only mixed-script cases are Japan and (to a rapidly decreasing degree) South Korea, which are already uniquely identified with solid dark pink, and labeled as mixed in the caption. The dark pink needs more contrast with red, though.

I was tempted to label some Central Asian countries as mixed Cyrillic-Latin; in particular, the three that have officially switched to Latin (Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan) have older and unofficial Cyrillic use continuing. OTOH, their official policies are firmly towards Latin rather than coexistence of Latin and Cyrillic. I think Tatarstan's Latinization move was vetoed by Moscow, so Cyrillic is still official there. I am not sure there are any cases where Latin and Cyrillic are officially equal.

Where needed, even better and easier than hatching would be adding dots of another color to indicate wide but unofficial use of a second script not confined to a specific region of a country. Hatching would leave it unclear which was official. --JWB 20:50, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Korean Peninsula

  1. Currently, South Korea is coloured as a mix of syllabary and logography The Korean alphabet isn't a syllabary any more than, say, the Vietnamese alphabet.
  2. I think the current use of Chinese characters in South Korea can be neglected, as it is restricted to certain kinds of text, such as academic literature and (sometimes only headlines in) newspapers. That is, you may have a hard time trying to find some Chinese characters in the streets of Seoul. Hence, I think the colour should not be different from that of North Korea.

Wikipeditor 01:05, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I sympathize with both of your points, but I'm afraid official or established usage may justify the status quo.

  1. Hangeul letters are certainly as alphabetic as any of the other alphabets' letters, and arguably take phonetic analysis to an even finer featural level than other alphabets. On the other hand, it is mandatory to arrange the letters in syllabic units. Clearly Korean is a unique case. A more accurate description would be something like "featural-alphabetic syllabary", but I don't know that such a term has achieved widespread usage, and "syllabary" is still the most used description. If the more accurate term can be shown to be established and not a neologism, I would support use of it here. However, simply labeling it as an alphabet would be misleading and leaving out the key feature of the script. The difference between Korean and others is comparable to the difference between alphabets, abugidas and abjads, which are distinguished on the map.
  2. I agree hanja are becoming much rarer and that people outside Korea are sometimes not aware how far this trend has progressed. However, they are still officially part of the language and a mandatory part of the school curriculum. The trend in hanja use does need to be explained, but at more length in the article text. I would not object to giving South Korea a unique color separate from Japan (although it would bulk up the caption), but it is not yet ready to be equated with North Korea.

--JWB 21:12, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Hanja is used to distinguish between words of similar sounding and different meaning. Similar to what was it, homonym? I don't think the incorporation of Chinese characters into Korean text makes Hangeul a featural alphabetic blah. And it's definitely not similar to Japanese stuffs either. King Sejong created the alphabet system to stand completely on its own, independent of the Chinese characters. Some ppl in court opposed the idea of creating a new alphabet system because it would somehow challenge the Chinese tributary system. With these things to consider, I'd say that Korean Hangeul be given its own "Hangeul" category. (Wikimachine 01:44, 22 August 2007 (UTC))
Hangeul does have its own category on the map. (with 2 colors reflecting use and nonuse of hanja in South and North Korea) "Featural" does not refer to inclusion of Chinese characters, but means that the shapes of most of the Hangeul letters were designed to reflect phonological features below the phoneme level, like place of articulation, which is not a dominant feature of any of the other scripts on the map. Hangeul is featural (partially but to a considerable degree) at the individual stroke level, alphabetic at the letter level, and syllabic at the block level. -JWB 14:53, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Singapore

There probably shouldn't be more special colours for single territories in the map, but with the resident population being about ¾ ethnic Chinese, and a Chinese language used in still more than ½ of homes, should Singapore perhaps be red? Is the Latin alphabet more common in public than Chinese characters are? I've never been there and have no idea of the the current situation. Wikipeditor 01:05, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I've been there and English is definitely the dominant language in public life (although much official signage is quadrilingual and a joy to polyglots) and apparently in much of private life too. What Chinese language there is in private life is split between Hokkien and other dialects for older people and Mandarin learned in school for younger Chinese. Younger Chinese seem to be considerably more fluent in English than in Mandarin. Private conversation is more spoken then written anyway, so perhaps less relevant to this discussion of writing systems.

I would not object to shading Singapore maybe 25% Chinese-script and a tiny bit of Tamil script, but this would be hard to do on one small dot. --JWB 21:23, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] China

How dominant are Chinese characters in Western China and other areas with sizeable non-Hàn populations? Has anybody been there recently? Wikipeditor 01:05, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

They are completely dominant for the Hàn populations of those regions, who are a majority or near-majority. The other nationalities also have to use Chinese in school and for public life outside their own neighborhoods.

If we introduce dots for minority languages or subregions, I think a few yellow and green dots are deserved, especially since there is actually room on the map for them. --JWB 21:28, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

  • Xinjiang: Uyghur 45%, Han 41% + Hui 5% in 2000
  • Xizang: Tibetan 93%, Han 6% + Hui 0.3% in 2000
  • Qinghai: Han 54% + Hui 16%, Tibetan 23% in 2000
  • Ningxia: Han 79% + Hui 20%, in 2000
  • Nei Menggu: Han 79%, Mongol 17% in 2000
Hmm, the proportion of Han in the TAR is far less than the impression I've gotten, but if so perhaps yellow background is appropriate, depending on what kind of language use we are considering. I think it is appropriate to count the Hui with the Han linguistically. I'm not sure how much the Mongol minority writes in Traditional Mongolian, Cyrillic, or perhaps just in Chinese language for many urbanized Mongols, and not at all for some rural Mongols. --JWB 22:04, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Accessibility problem

As stated in WP:COLOR, "ensure that colour is not the only way used to convey important information." In this case, probably the best option is to list the countries where each writing system is used (specifying at the end that Latin is used for the rest). Other possible solutions? Cheers —surueña 16:15, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree. Put that information in the image description. l'aqúatique talktome 20:04, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

The image is not used in isolation but as a part of articles, and those articles list the writing systems. The caption is also supplied as part of an article, i.e. the caption at the image itself is never displayed except when you look at the image page in isolation. --JWB (talk) 21:12, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] EU countries lack borders

Why does this map show the EU as one single state? Wikipedia should be objective, not a place for EU fanboys. My country certainly isn’t Germany. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ystad (talk • contribs) 17:31, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thaana

I can't find Thaana in the map. Help me look for it. Alexius08 (talk) 08:37, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Maldives, left of the tip of India. --JWB (talk) 21:06, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Korean peninsula (again)

Just curious, but isn't the same writing system used in both North and South Korea, and therefore they should be the same colour on the map? Astronaut (talk) 03:19, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Moldavia

Moldavia should be Cyrillic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.46.217.248 (talk) 17:50, 4 June 2008 (UTC)