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about.html
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about.html
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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>ABOUT</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>ABOUT</h2>
<p style="text-align:justify;">Linguists interested in linguistic typology — the systematic study of the
ways in which the languages of the world vary structurally and of the
limits to this variation — began in the 1980s to ask questions relating
to the geographical distribution of different values for
linguistic features. For instance, we may want to know whether languages
having the same grammatical structure, are found only in one part of
the world, whether they are distributed more or less evenly across
different parts of the world, or whether some in between scenario holds.
<p style="text-align:justify;">In this project we try to explore few such linguistic features of languages.
We use maps to show the geographical locations of the areas in which the language is spoken.
The maps provide a visual overview of the distribution by using different colored dots for the different feature values.
The languages are represented on the maps as dots, rather than as regions, but it
should be borne in mind that many languages are spoken over areas larger than the dots.
<p style="text-align:justify;">We look at the <b>Family of Languages</b> in our first visualization. A language family is a group
of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language,
called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language
origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people
in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy
<p style="text-align:justify;"> In the visualization, we represent the families with a bubble chart.
The size of the bubble represents the number of languages belongnig to that family. clicked on the bubble, we show the locations
of all the languages belongnig to that family on the map. We also display a bar chart which shows us the distribution of languages
with respect to countries.
<p style="text-align:justify;"> In the second visualization we explore the <b>Number of Genders and the Gender Based Systems</b>
In some languages gender is evident in almost every phrase, while in other languages it is absent.
This contrast raises interesting questions as to its function.
Equally, in some languages it is relatively easy to determine the type of gender system and to
establish how many genders the language has, while in others it takes careful analysis.
<p style="text-align:justify;">We try to show the Gender Based System using a tree layout. We also show the distribution of number of languages
belongnig to each system with a pie chart and show the locations of the languages on the map.
The map is based on 256 languages, of which somewhat over half (144) have no gender system. A minimal gender system requires
two genders, and such systems are common, with 50 examples in this sample. Three genders is around half as common (26 examples)
and four genders, about half as common again (12).
Larger systems, with five or more genders, are treated together, and represent a substantial minority (24 languages in the sample).
</body>
</html>