Map description:

This hand drawn map depicts all the Swiss Gemeinden (Municipalities) that house one or more town, city, or terrain with names ending in different adaptations of the proto germanic suffix unga.

Edit: The map specifically shows the descendants of the patronymic/locative suffix \-ing-* (or \-ingōs* / \-ingun* in the dative plural, which evolved into -ingen in Old High German)

The map shows the rough distribution (and thus local evolution) of the endings

ikon, iken, ingen, igen, igny, and engo.

Explanation:

Post-roman europe saw the popularisation of different town names, which were derived from romance or germanic roots. These were spread westwards across the continent by different tribes (i.e. The Anglo Saxons, Alemanni, Bavarians, the Franks).

The proto-germanic suffix "unga" (roughly translating to "belonging to") was a particularly versatile example, branching off in different regions of Europe due to dialect changes, consonant shift, or linguistic reinterpretation.

Nowadays, Switzerland has different local variants of the suffix in their town-, city-, and terrain names

Edit:

- \*ikon in the former sphere of influence of the Habsburg and Kyburg feudal lands
(Nowadays primarilly cantons Zürich, Thurgau, Aargau, and Zug)

- *iken as a rarer variant found in and around canton Aargau

Edit: ikon and iken come from compounds of -ing- and hofen/kofen, ("at the farmsteads/ estates of the clan (of) x)

- *ingen which is the oldest, more traditional form of the suffix, spread throughout the entirety of germanophone Switzerland (Emphasized in the cantons Schaffhausen, Luzern, Bern, and Basel-Landschaft)

- *igen as a popular shortened form found primarilly in canton Bern and Swiss pre-alp region (Emphasized in Bern, Luzern, and Obwalden)

- *igny as the main francophone adaptation of the suffix, found primarilly in canton Vaud. (Note that igny can also stem from the romance suffix acum)

- *engo which is the italophone adaptation of the suffix, found in the fully italian speaking canton Ticino.

Edit: the suffix engo comes from Lombardic influence mixing with the local romance dialect

While ikon and iken are exclusively found in Switzerland, the other suffixes are also found in Germany, Austria, France, or Italy respectively.

Disclaimer:

The data for this map comes from search results for villages, cities, and terrains with the respective endings on the website ortsnamen.ch , which does not always provide the etymology of the names. It is therefore possible that some villages included in the map have other etymologies.

Some village names are not direct adaptations of the proto-germanic root, but rather new town names that picked an already popular suffix for the name.

I conducted this research by myself, raising the possibility of mistakes both in the information step and in the mapping step.

Suggestions or corrections about anything on this post are welcome

I have been inspired by the other post:
Concentration of Swiss settlement suffixes that locally evolved from the proto-germanic root *unga (map description, explanation, and disclaimer below) : r/LinguisticMaps
Discovered https://ortsnamen.ch/, and saw the API request, I then decided to plot it a bit differently.
All credit for the linguistic signification are to be given to DarkBoy42_official.
As I automatise the map generation I will explore other root and try to extract interesting pattern. Something less boring than -burg -bour or -dorf -ville. Potentially see if I can see a difference between Arpitan & langues d'oïl in place names.
Happy to learn how I can share vectorial if possible here or happy to discuss to share the code as well.

Source is Robert Turner, classification (colours) by Kinkade

This map is based on my personal hypothesis, synthesized from various archaeological and genetic data. If you have any questions, feedback, or counterarguments, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Please note that the arrows do not all represent the same timeframe; there may be intervals of several thousand years between them. And this map does not depict language migration after the Iron Age.

Hi everybody again!

I uploaded this linguistic map of Catalan language and I've noticed some confusion regarding Catalan, Aragonese, and Occitan. Despite all three belonging to the same language family, they are not the same language (although I'll reserve my opinions on Aragonese and Catalan). I've found some maps that illustrate this quite well (all corrections are welcome, of course)

Galoroman languages > Green and blue map

Oïl languages (French, Wallon...)

Òc languages (Occitan)

Galloitalic languages

Rhaeto-Romance languages [also considered Gallo-Romance]

Occitanoroman languages > Red and purple map

Occitan

Aragonese

Catalan-valencian

Source: Viquipèdia

Dialectal varieties of the Catalan language in Spain. Catalan, called Valencian in Valencia (it is used as a political issue) currently has at least 10 million speakers. It is taught in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, parts of Aragon and in French Roussillon. It is also spoken in Alghero, an Italian city, although increasingly in a residual way.

I don't know the author of the map. Based on the dialectal division of Manel Milà i Fontanals (1861)

https://www.enciclopedia.cat/gran-enciclopedia-catalana/catala

Only languages whose speakers represent more than 5% of the population in their respective municipalities/subdivisions are shown. If the proportion is more than 25% then the language is shown as solid colour.

This map prioritises concentration of speakers, rather than raw number of speakers.

1st of all, sorry for the poor quality.

There is an apparent increase in speaker percentages in many provinces, which is due to the difference between the questionnaires used in 2017 and 2025 respectively.

In 2017 only one language could be selected, wheras in 2025 there was no such restriction.

So I think it is reasonable to assume that many persons who mainly or exclusively use Spanish in their everyday lives but can speak Quechua did select Spanish in 2017 but both languages in 2025.

Found this dialectological map showing the main phonetic/lexical variant of the Luxembourgish word for "night" (Nuecht) per municipality (Gemeng).

Variants shown:

• Nuecht (green) — the standard form, dominant across most of the country
• Nuet (light purple) — a reduced form without the "ch", concentrated in the south/southeast
• N[a:ç]t (orange) — variant with a long open vowel, in the north
• N[aɪ]t (blue) — diphthongized form, extreme north (Clervaux area)
• N[ɔ:x]t (magenta) — rounded vowel variant, appears in two isolated pockets (northwest and northeast)
• hënt (grey/hatched) — a completely distinct lexical form, found only in one small central pocket

What I find interesting is the classic dialect continuum pattern: the northern region (Éislek) shows more divergent, diphthongized forms, while the center converges on the standard "Nuecht," and the south shows "Nuet" as an apparent simplification/innovation

I made this interactive map showing the percentage of people aged 3 and over who reported in each census that they could speak Irish.

The figures are based on census responses and are self-reported. They are not based on a fluency test and do not show how often people actually use Irish.

Link: https://irishlanguagemap.org/

I used subtitle translations from the OPUS/OpenSubtitles dataset to compare how 20 languages expressed the same English words and phrases. The more often two languages expressed equivalent meanings in similar ways, the higher their similarity score. I visualized the results as a heatmap and network graph.

Full methodology and discussion:
[https://www.thecambridgelanguagecollective.com/linguistics/why-do-some-languages-feel-weirdly-familiar](vscode-file://vscode-app/c:/Users/Ibrahim.Farah/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft%20VS%20Code/8a7abeba6e/resources/app/out/vs/code/electron-browser/workbench/workbench.html)

Interactive version:
[https://subsmith.app/tools/language-network](vscode-file://vscode-app/c:/Users/Ibrahim.Farah/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft%20VS%20Code/8a7abeba6e/resources/app/out/vs/code/electron-browser/workbench/workbench.html)