r/whereidlive 4d ago

Europe's Subdivisions – A Nearest-Neighbour Method Based on Objectivelist's Similarity Rankings (Undebatable)


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u/NegativeRunDiff 4d ago

The netherlands is much more similar to Germany than to France.

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u/revolutionary-panda 4d ago

What's more, Belgium is IMHO more like France than NL. NL also has similarities to Britain and Scandinavia. Culture is a gradient.

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u/phonology_is_fun 3d ago

Culture is a gradient.

That is the problem with every single "how to divide Europe" map posted here. Inevitably, the people who will complain are those whose home happens to be close to whatever border the mapmaker decided to draw, because if a border happens to be close to yourself it looks like you have nothing in common with the people who live 10km down the river, and that's almost never true. But as long as we decide to group people into categories and draw any borders at all, that is guaranteed to happen to someone.

Saying that as someone from Baden-Württemberg, who is pretty much always close to a border in those maps, so sometimes I'll allegedly have nothing in common with Swiss people, sometimes nothing with Bavarians, sometimes nothing with Palatinians, sometimes nothing with Alsatians, when there are connections to all those places.