Who Speaks Your Language?

Enter the name of a language into The Language World Map and it will show you all the countries in the world where that language is spoken.

You can enter more than one language into the map, which means that you can create some nice comparison maps of different languages. For example the map below shows where Spanish and Portuguese are spoken. This map is a neat visualization of the effect of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas on the spread of Spanish and Portuguese.  

In the Treaty of Tordesillas Spain and Portugal basically divided the 'new' world in two along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. The effect was that Portugal ended up with Brazil and colonies in Africa, while Spain got most of the Americas (bar Brazil). The result is that Spanish is spoken in most of South and Central America, while Portuguese remains the official language of Brazil.

The map doesn't include any notes on the taxonomy used for the languages or the criteria used for choosing which languages are spoken in a country. For example the map only shows two languages spoken in China (Chinese and Macau). It would be interesting to know why these two languages were chosen for China as opposed to say Mandarin and Cantonese (Mandarin and Cantonese appear to have been subsumed into one language (Chinese) rather than being classified as two separate languages). 

This isn't particularly a criticism of the map. I think it would be hard to avoid debates about which are the main languages spoken in a particular country and how you define separate languages (as opposed to say dialects). However it would be nice to know the criteria that are actually used by the Language World Map to determine which languages are spoken in a country. 

Also See

The Map of World Languages - an interactive map of 6924 living languages, 105 historic languages, 220 extinct languages, and 5 constructed languages
Living Languages - an interactive map showing where 7,168 living languages are spoken around the world.