Publication Languages
Publication Languages
Woodstock’s Special Collections contain materials in more than 40 different languages, but the majority of the collection is dominated by just two languages: Latin and English, which together account for over 70% of the collection. The collection also includes significant holdings in French, Italian, German, and Spanish.
This chart shows the percentage makeup of the collection by publication languages and summarizes the linguistic breakdown of the collection as a whole.
This heat map shows trends in the collection's top six publication languages (English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish), from the late 15th century to the present, showing that the distribution of publication languages is not constant over time. Each colored mark represents the number of books published in a given language in a single year. The darker the color--the greater the frequency of publication in that year. The chart shows a definite trend over time: while Latin dominates the older portions of the collection, the use of vernacular languages grows throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, and by the 19th century Latin has been superseded by English as the dominant language of the collection.
The bar graph below breaks publication language data down by century. Columns represent the total number of books published each century; colored blocks within the columns represent the number of works published in each language, by century.