Mapping Language: Names, Speakers and Voices

Maps have long been understood as texts, encumbered with internal and socio-contextual meanings and evoking different ways of interpreting, representing or writing space. However, the abstraction of mapping as language can obscure the important role of maps in identifying and organising languages, rendering names and scripts and (in)visibilising minority speakers. In this conversational piece, we reflect on our experience of working with and on maps and mapmakers that have had a notable influence in shaping linguistic conventions and ideas, suggesting geographers have much to contribute to our understanding of language by engaging with such mapping. Focusing on two key colonial figures in the history of the Royal Geographical Society, Robert Needham Cust (1821–1909) and George Curzon (1859–1925) and their linguistically significant maps of India and Persia, this piece illuminates how such maps rendered the unpredictable geography of speakers and the naming of places as problems, but also as a solution that fixed them on the map with repercussions for their realities on-the-ground to this day.