Welcome to see a self-organized map of some European languages. The map is produced using the self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm developed by professor Teuvo Kohonen in the beginning of 1980's.
The sources of the examples have been collected using Tyler Jones' great Human-Languages Page. The translitterations are the same as in the original writings.
P.S. My personal interest to multilingual issues stems, for instance, from the Glossasoft project that developed methods and guidelines for software internationalisation and localisation. I consider it important that software developers take into account the local needs already from the very beginning of the software development process.
Script-specific aspects (character encoding, character sizes, line size and spacing), language-specific aspects (collating sequence, hyphenation rules, morphological rules), numbers and dates, etc. are examples of the basic issues. Sophisticated multilingual text processing systems are emerging. In addition, societal conventions and cultural issues are to be remembered as well as the issues related to multimedia production, multilingual and multicultural network-based applications, and adaptive systems. Consider e-mail as a basic example: I wish I could easily send you a message containing Greek characters!
Timo Honkela's home page.