How To Visualize Language Polygons with QGIS (How to Do X in Linguistics 15)

Abstract

This tutorial shows how to build beautiful maps using polygon data of language distributions and the geospatial software QGIS. For this purpose, I show in the first part how to extract a list of Glottocodes from CLDF datasets and how to use command-line tools to extract the polygon data from Glottography datasets. The second part focuses on the visualization of the extracted data with QGIS. In this part, I also show to include non-linguistic data like archaeological sites and how to prepare the map for printing. The tutorial is fully implemented with free and open software and intends to make map-making accessible for linguists and other researchers.