Long term readers of this blog would probably know that I occasionally like to mess around with Google Earth and to try out new things to do with languages and so forth. It began with an exercise in mapping some known and established place names in the Sydney Metropolitan Area, mostly concentrated in and around the Harbour, and then it moved on to a small project of mine to map the region of the Northern Territory with which Wagiman is traditionally associated¹.

Another project I began, and finished, a while ago, was to take the divided segments of the AIATSIS map of Australia’s Indigenous languages, and overlay them as images onto Google’s Earth. When I say ‘finished’, what I mean is, I’d posted it to the Google Earth community as a downloadable file, but I didn’t know that I’d screwed it up and made the images too transparent to see the language boundaries clearly.

Just the other day though, Jungurra expressed some interest in using it for the Australian Languages course that he’ll be teaching from next week, which prompted me to go and fix it up and make all the images fully opaque. So now, the whole thing can be made transparent so that the images don’t necessarily block the satellite images beneath. The new file can be found here.

Preparing this made me realise just how much of a problem the curvature of the Earth actually is. The further south you get, the more the images have to be contorted into place, and therefore the larger the discrepancy in location at some points. Some of the maps are displaced by anything up to about a hundred kilometres.

I don’t know how receptive AIATSIS are to this sort of new-fangled technology, but I think it’s something that they, even in collaboration with Google, could should think about, and eventually produce a Google Maps or Google Earth package of files that show languages and language boundaries. I envisage a situation where the language names and boundaries are treated as place names and borders like any others, and not as images that become blurred the further in you zoom.

At the end of the day, this is a bit of fun, but perhaps there are practical applications to such widespread popular things like Google Earth such that linguists, and others, can put them to (more) good educational use.

~

<update>
Here’s a screenshot, which I wasn’t able to do earlier. This is with the opacity of the AIATSIS map overlayed images turned quite far down, otherwise, you’d just be looking at the overlay, and it wouldn’t be very interesting. You can also see here how imperfect the fitting together of the original segments is, as there’s quite a lot of overlap, and boundaries that don’t quite match. But you know, I did the best I could. Click on the image for the larger size.

screenshot

You can even see Wagiman in the middle there.
</update>

¹As opposed to ‘where Wagiman is spoken’, for clear sociolinguistic reasons.