For my final data visualization project, I chose to work with a dataset that lists all the dead languages on earth.Â
I decided to work with this dataset because I have never really learned much about dead languages before, so this topic piqued my curiosity.Â
In my visualization, the data is represented as points (Skull emojis) that you can hover over. I decided not to take this project too seriously, and by making the points silly-looking skulls, I know I am able to get a chuckle out of most viewers.Â
To interact with the visualization, try hovering over the skulls with your pointer. It will then (hopefully) show the number of dead languages in a country
One interesting thing I noticed during this project is how many languages there are, and how little people speak them. For example, many native languages from both North and South America have only a handful of sepakers left, ranging from below 20 to a couple hundred. There are over 4000 dead languages in the world. And those are the dead ones. There must be so many languages in the world and so many different ways of communicating.Â
Something I still wonder about is how long will these dead languages last? Some dead languages are just limited to 3 or 4 speakers, and some are already extinct. Many languages that are centuries old will end this decade, and pretty much no new languages are being created.Â
The most challenging moment of this project was cleaing the dataset. In order to get the data I needed, I needed to write programs for Google sheets. Most of the programs did most but not all the work. After I wrote the programs, I had to go through the dataset and manually clean things up.Â
If I had more time, I would like to be able to list the names of the languages and the number of speakers for each one.Â
My proudest moment during this project was when I finally got it all together and it worked flawlessly.Â