I spent some time digging into John Molloy's 1867 Grammar of the Irish Language, as it turned out that he quoted extensively from a number of extinct Irish Gaelic dialects, including Midleton in East Cork, which I had never seen before.

Molloy's sources come from a number of places where Irish has since died out, such as North-East Cork, Clare and Sligo. As part of writing this piece, I mapped the locations of his sources as best I could. Molloy's orthography made it a bit challenging to find the right locations, to say nothing of his own extensive but mysterious directions to his hometown (which I may attempt to map in future).

The live map can be seen here.

I decided to catalogue the Midleton words across Molloy's 36 word lists, they are available to view on Github. It's only based on one speaker, however his sounds are corroborated against other nearby dialects frequently, so it's not solely based on however he spoke at the time.

I wrote up a blog post discussing the words, the sources and various observations for anyone interested: https://anmeidheach.substack.com/p/molloys-midleton-dialect

Some things I noticed:

• It has some similarities to what we would now consider Déise Irish. For example, it uses a lenited ṫá/thá, as well as the /aɪ/ sound associated with Waterford Irish for certain words (e.g. the Midleton source uses it for geimhreadh, 'winter'). Midleton and the Kildorrery and Kilworth sources in Cork seem to be at least influenced by East Munster Irish.
• In some cases Molloy declares a Midleton word to be incorrect, however it is now the standard word in modern times, e.g. loċta, a loft (Molloy: lota, Ó Dónaill: loċta)
• We see the Munster Irish tendency to double the do word before verbs, e.g. do ḋairig sé mé ('he heard me'). Interestingly, there's a case where do is used in the present tense by the Midleton speaker - do ṫá sé in sun (‘he is there’)

It was great to find a large cache of words from a dialect I had presumed was unrecorded, hopefully there are more like this for other dialects out there.

The first map is showing percentage of Aymara speakers for the 65+ age group only, i.e. persons born before 1911.

The second map is showing the percentage of Aymara speakers across all age groups.

Thus the two maps are showing the development of more or less one whole century.

The reason I am using two different age group is that I can thus show language change between c. 1900 and c. 2000.

I decided to map the dialects mentioned by Brian Ó Cuív in his Irish Dialects and Irish Speaking Districts (1950) as still being alive (albeit barely in some cases) at the time of writing.

The live map can be found here.

Ó Cuív sent out a survey to 450 schools asking if anyone in the area still spoke Irish, and around 160 of those replied (mostly saying there weren't), meaning there were probably other dialects not listed but still in existence. He goes into depth on some of them in the book (Ballymacoda in particular).

For context, of the areas on this map, only two are now still Irish-speaking areas (Múscraí Thiar/West Muskerry and Cléire/Cape Clear), so the vast majority of these dialects have vanished.

For those interested, I wrote a short blog about it and tried to list some examples of recordings from these areas where possible.

The list of words by language see here: Tits/boobs in different languages - Google Таблицы
Feel free to add there or comment below. I tried to find the colloquial (but not rude) term for the meaning 'female breast' but apparently it's no easy, especially for the minor languages.

In the last month we have seen a surge of AI generated content shared here on r/LinguisticMaps. This has consisted of pictures of language maps or infographics or long LLM generated texts as submission statements or comments.

I would like to ask the r/LinguisticMaps community how this type of content should be treated here. Should it be allowed? Should it be banned? Does the use of AI need to be declared? Or should AI content only be allowed on particular days?

What do the subscribers of this suab say? Please share your thoughts here.

The first map is showing percentage of Quechua speakers for the 65+ age group only, i.e. persons born before 1911.

The second map is showing the percentage of Quechua speakers across all age groups.

Thus the two maps are showing the development of more or less one whole century.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

A map that was made in 2021. Is it still accurate today? are there any subreddits that would give more information on what subdivisions speak what languages predominantly