This is a map of living indigenous languages in the US, Canada, and northern Mexico. It’s not a historical snapshot or pre-contact or anything similar. Rather, this is as close as one could make to a contemporary but all-encompassing map showing the areas where it would make sense to speak the language today, mapped for the most part to contemporary political boundaries. The question I asked myself was, “What language should the street signs be in?”

The map incorporates historical information, reserve and reservation locations, and sacred sites as best I could identify. It also includes local placenames where I could find them and where they fit. Because of this, it looks only at the languages that are either still alive or which are well-enough documented that they could come back to life. Languages that are gone entirely are only shown if there isn’t a living language that would make sense for the place.

This map is by its nature reductivist. Hard boundaries don’t always make sense, because reservations are shared between tribes with different languages. Historically, borders didn’t always exist, and someplace like Ohio got resettled by a few tribes in overlapping ways before they were displaced again. However, the overall aim is to create something legible and relatable to English speakers for whom this geography is otherwise entirely foreign.

A “dormant” language is one that is learnable but is not typically used for everyday communication today. These are most likely to be the subject of revitalization efforts, like Coahuilteco or Nipmuc (Loup A). While not all revitalization efforts stick, the aim is to show the languages that could be learned and spoken. Extinct languages, on the other hand, might only be known by a few words. For the most part, these do not appear on the map, but those in areas that were not resettled by indigenous peoples are shown. Beothuk, Erie, and Bay Miwok are among these languages.

This current version of the map is based on information from native-land.ca, Native Languages of the Americas, Wikipedia, and a huge number of other resources, including tribal members and linguists reached through Reddit. However, I would like to slowly work my way across the continent map to reconstruct these data using academic sources, documenting each source along the way. While this is likely to be a years-long process, the end result will be both this map and the background data necessary to reconstruct and remix these data as researchers and others see fit.

Update to version 0.7: 2/15/2022

The next iteration will explore ways to show multilingual zones. This will most significantly impact multilingual reserves and reservations and central Canada. The next version will also include updates to Michigan and the Ontario Peninsula. This area had significant disruption around the turn of the 19th Century, particularly during the Beaver Wars. There are some enclaves to add here, and I am reaching out to scholars and tribes to determine whether the tribes with the Chippewa name speak Chippewa or Nishnaabemowin (Eastern Ojibwa).

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this map going to be for sale?

Yes! The map will be available for sale once it is largely complete. At the moment, each iteration has seen a large number of edits and updates, but once that calms down it will be more or less complete.

Why don’t you color by language family?

I did think of combining similar languages with different colors, but there just aren’t enough colors. There are 40+ language families, and a lot of language isolates, and a lot of these aren't contiguous. Ojibwe is a language continuum like German or Arabic, where they're all viewed as dialects of one language even if they're not all mutually intelligible. In contrast, Cree-Montaignais is more like the Romance Language dialect continuum, where all the member languages are viewed as separate languages, even if they are often mutually intelligible. Meanwhile, you have the Athabaskan language family, which includes Navajo and North Slavey; these are very different languages and separated by quite a ways. Unfortunately, a non-language-based coloration scheme just doesn't work for this.

What’s going on in Ohio?

A couple of reasons, but the biggest one is the lack of overlap in areas. This particular area was part of the Fort People's territory and, while it would show their language as extinct, the whole area was resettled by a number of different people: Ottawa, Myaamia, Unami, Erie, Seneca, and Shawnee. Given that, it would have been very common to hear all kinds of languages spoken in Ohio before colonization.

Still, I tried to draw lines around areas settled by each group, looking at maps from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia showing settlement patterns as late as I could find. This area was claimed by Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy), but other tribes also came in and settled down around there. Still, this area was in flux for decades; corrections are welcome.

Resources and References

I have been working on a side project to this, which is to map the national borders at their greatest extent, as best I can, using modern GIS tools. One purpose of this is to ensure my language map is as accurate as possible within the constraints I’ve set out for myself. This side project includes gleaning additional information about villages, campsites, and placenames from dictionaries, ethnographies, old maps, and more. It is challenging work, but, as far as I can tell, this is the first time a lot of these borders and places have been mapped in a single location.

To help researchers, here are two links to my source material. These are semi-organized, but I think once you start poking around you should get a sense of what is where. They are also live links - as I update my data, there will be changes to what is available here. Take a look, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

First is my Resources library - the various documents I’ve been using to map what I can. It mostly includes mountains of scanned ethnographies from the first half of the 20th Century and is dominated by California.

Second is my Map library. Some of these maps have been georeferenced as TIF files, many have not, and many come from the source ethnographies. I have tried to obtain bibliographic data for those that are not from my Resources library, and filenames are usually intended to be similar enough to their source document that I can track it down if necessary.