Please help me find some linguistics posters!

May 28, 2009 8:37 AM

Looking to purchase some awesome linguistics-related posters. I've searched for hours on the internet and I can't seem to find any family tree posters, IPA posters, or even anything remotely related to linguistics that is interesting and somewhat academic.

It would be cake to find something like the "History of Programming Languages" poster, but for Indo-European languages or some other branch of the world tree. I'm tempted to just make a language tree poster myself, but that'd be a LOT of work.

Also, any ideas to spruce up a giant bulletin board and/or small linguistics 'lab' room are welcome.

posted by iamkimiam to education (8 answers total)

Well, you can get that damn chart as a poster, but that's not very exciting.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:50 AM on May 28, 2009 [3 favorites]

Posters of language families.

National Geographic had a really nice poster of a tree showing how all of the world's languages are related. You might be able to sniff around for the back issue where the map was initially distributed.
posted by Alison at 8:56 AM on May 28, 2009

"that damn chart"

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Oh my goodness, that is EXACTLY what the IPA chart should always be called. So necessary, but so insufferable.
posted by ocherdraco at 9:12 AM on May 28, 2009

Alison's got the right idea. Go to your next local public library's book sale -- they'll probably have a maps and atlases section and/or a ton or three of old National Geographic issues. Dig through those; it'll be fun, cheap and you'll probably score some nice maps.
posted by cog_nate at 9:23 AM on May 28, 2009

If you've got a good printer, the poster for this year's Workshop On American Indian Linguistics at UCSB (online here) was a doozy. (Great conference too.) In general, look for conference and workshop announcements, as these often generate graphics.
posted by fourcheesemac at 9:28 AM on May 28, 2009 [4 favorites]

Actually, National Geographic has all their stuff indexed, so you can look for particular issues that have map supplements. Here's the Languages subject entry -- browse through it for entries that say "NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine map supplement" or "NGM Map Supplement" in the Publisher column. Each of those records will have a date. Good hunting!
posted by cog_nate at 9:35 AM on May 28, 2009

If you find large images you like online, you could have them made into posters at a copy shop. Here are a few that might work for you from among my bookmarks:

- Indo-European family tree (since this is a vector graphic, I think it can be blown up with no loss of quality to be able to be used to create whatever size poster you want)
- Writing systems of the world map (would be smallish as a poster but still a nice size)
- Generic names for soft drinks by county (would be a page-sized poster)
- There are several very good linguistic maps of South Asia (#1, #2, #3), which would make large, beautiful posters, in an online atlas of the region hosted at the Digital South Asia Libary; it doesn't seem like you can access the image files themselves, but the Flash viewer that displays them does have a print command
posted by Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh at 10:03 AM on May 28, 2009 [3 favorites]

A map of North American languages hangs in my linguistics department hallway. As does one of Brazilian languages.

Do you or your colleagues have conference posters you could hang?
posted by knile at 1:16 PM on May 28, 2009