System Metternich posted:

Catholics in the western hemisphere, to be precise. Catholicism is booming in Africa and Asia, 92% of Catholic Nigerians attend mass at least weekly and the fact that the number of priests is actually growing again is almost exclusively due to this boom. Sadly they're almost universally hardcore conservative when compared to European and American Catholics.

e:

Torrannor posted:

Wait, Catholics as a percentage of the whole population actually grew in Saudi from 1970 to whenever the map was made? And is that dot in Iraq grey for stable?

Torrannor posted:

Wait, Catholics as a percentage of the whole population actually grew in Saudi Arabia from 1970 to whenever the map was made? And is that dot in Iraq grey for stable?

Edit: Forgot "Arabia"

Vivian Darkbloom posted:

for USA, public enemy numero uno is terrorism. and also cyberterrorism. those are really the two conflict risks for america

Mexico and Yemen have their lil' wars going on. Wikipedia's map of ongoing conflicts by deaths per year might be more interesting:

Torrannor posted:

Shiite rebels against the Sunni government, it's actually more than a "little" conflict.

Count Roland posted:

And that catholic map is interesting too, its been a good morning. I'm surprised Canada's Catholic population is increasing; I guess its from immigration, but wouldn't huge immigration from Mexico also cause the US population to go up?

wukkar posted:

Those population density maps look simply like PlacesNearWater.jpg to me. What are some places that have crazy high density but are not near major rivers/oceans/lakes/seas?

Jaramin posted:

Why would anyone build a city somewhere they cant get water? Even those Siberian blips are near rivers.

quote:

Map showing the flag of the country that residents of each country pictured consider the biggest threat to world peace.

"In the course of the WIN/Gallup International's annual global End of Year survey, residents from different countries were asked which country they see as the greatest threat to peace in the world.

The corresponding question was: "Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?"

The national flags shown within the boundaries of surveyed nations refer to the country which was mentioned most frequently by the interviewees.

By a wide margin, the US are percieved as the greatest threat to universal peace. They are followed by Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and China."

ekuNNN posted:

icantfindaname posted:

Looks about right yeah

Also, what flag does Italy have?

Pook Good Mook posted:

Calling bullshit on the map. Pretty sure Ukraine has some other candidates that probably beat out the US.

pik_d posted:

Well to be fair it is last year's results: http://www.wingia.com/en/services/end_of_year_survey_2013/country_results/7/37/. This year's comes out in December.

Badger of Basra posted:

Edit for content:


I have no idea what the percents are supposed to be.

DarkCrawler posted:

Yeah, I'm guessing Russia is going to have a pretty big surge. And Syria/Israel.

ekuNNN posted:

Disco Infiva posted:

Who's that in Kenya?

Pakled posted:

snip

Pakled posted:

The 2012 Election if only whites could vote:

Lycus posted:

Most of the map turns red, but swing state Iowa stays blue? Huh.

SaltyJesus posted:

Shamelessly stolen from the D&D pics thread:

TheImmigrant posted:

Is Minas in white a reference to Pampulha in Belo Horizonte?

bagual posted:

reads: New Cuba, Brazil, Implode and build a giant lake;

New Cuba are states where Dilma had the majority of votes, "Brazil" is majority Aecio, and the future giant artificial lake is Aecio's home state, where he served a term as governor, which had a Dilma majority and elected a PT governor this time around. Some political scientists say that the crushing defeat at his home state is one of the main reasons he lost and Dilma won, as it was a real tight vote with only a 3 million vote difference between candidates in a 110 million vote election. The tears are glorious.

made of bees posted:

I mean, are they really any closer than Danish and Norwegian?

VerdantSquire posted:

I just learned that apparently, Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are actually the same exact language, and all those Balkan nations saying that they're separate are just speaking right out of their rear end.

SaltyJesus posted:

Yugo reporting for duty.

Serbo-Croatian is linguistically considered to be one pluricentric language with four standard forms (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin). The difference between official Croatian and official Serbian is almost negligible, even little kids follow media in either "language" with perfect clarity. There is an apocryphal story that after the 90s crises, when the country split up it took a while for many foreign countries to realize they don't have to re-train diplomats in the local language after they move them to the neighboring country.

While official Serbian and Croatian are 100% mutually intelligible, with the exception of some region-specific words, because both are based on the Shtokavian dialect, there are other dialects within each country with much lower mutual intelligibility. A Shtokavian speaking Croat will perfectly understand his Serb friend but will follow a Chakavian or Kajkavian speaking Croat with some difficulty. A Shtokavian speaking Serb will likewise understand his Croat buddy but will have trouble following somebody from South-East Serbia. (where I'm from ) The South Slavic languages are on a neat dialect continuum, going North-West to South-East you get to hear the spoken language gradually transition.

The dialects can also be divided according to which reflex of the proto-Slavic vowel "jat" they use. Thus there are Ekavian, Ijekavian and Ikavian dialects.

Beautiful: Lep (Ekavian), Lijep (Ijekavian), Lip (Ikavian)
Faith: Vera (Ekavian), Vjera (Ijekavian), Vira (Ikavian)

All this gets a lot more involved with migrations, border changes in the last century or so, linguistic enclaves, transitional dialects, attempts at assimilation etc.

Also Serbian is the only language in Europe to officially use two alphabets as far as I know, plus we have a print and cursive script for both Cyrillic and Latin so I had to learn four scripts in school.

E: If this is actually interesting to anybody I can do a long effortpost on South Slavic languages, this time with a ton of politically-loaded maps to boot.

SaltyJesus posted:

Linguistically it's considered the same language with four standard forms. However, the differences between the forms are smaller than between some dialects of English in UK alone. I wrote about this at length in previous posts.

The short version is this. There is more difference between dialects within the ex-Yu countries than between the official literary forms. The standard or literary forms of all four languages are based on the Shtokavian dialect. A Croat who speaks shtokavian will have zero difficulty understanding a Serb speaking shtokavian, but he might have trouble with strong chakavian or kajkavian dialects. Same in reverse goes for a Serb speaking shtokavian and one speaking the torlakian dialect. But all this is kind of moot because the chakavian/kajkavian/torlakian have all been in a decline and most people who speak them dilute them with shtokavian. Interestingly the Croatian minority in Romania called called Krashovani speak with the torlakian dialect. Bulgarians like to think torlakian is a transitional dialect of Bulgarian.

Within shtokavian there are subdivisions (I won't go into old shtokavian and new shtokavian) that are ekavian, (i)jekavian or ikavian. This is how most people recognize roughly where you're from, the difference is whether your (exact same) words use the i, e, je or ije sound. For example pretty could be "lepo", "lipo", "ljepo" or "lijepo".

Montenegrins tried to introduce two new letters for soft Š and soft Ž but a lot of teachers in Montenegro refused to teach it, I don't know what the situation is like now. These two letters were literally never a part of their written tradition, even when they had their own kingdom and everything. Several other regions in ex-Yu speak shtokavian with the softer š and ž but never felt the need to give them their own letter. It's language politics as usual.

TL;DR It's the same language.

SaltyJesus posted:

If we're citing Wikipedia then I'll cite the very-well sourced page on Serbo-Croatian. Go to the page to follow the sources if you wish.

Wiki posted:

The mutual intelligibility between their speakers "exceeds that between the standard variants of English, French, German, or Spanish".[67] Sean McLennan argues that the differences between the variants of Serbo-Croatian are less significant than those between the variants of English.[68] Heinz-Dieter Pohl maintains that the differences between the variants of Serbo-Croatian are less significant than those between the variants of German.[69] Bernhard Gröschel asserts that the differences between the variants of Serbo-Croatian are less significant than those between the Dutch and the Flemish variants of Dutch.[70] Gröschel argues that even linguistic differences between Whites and Blacks in the USA major cities exceed those between the standard variants of Serbo-Croatian.[70] Daniel Blum maintains that the distinctions between the variants of Serbo-Croatian are less significant than those between the Hindi and the Urdu variants of Hindustani.[71]

There's more gold on that page like:

Wiki posted:

• Standard Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin are completely mutually intelligible.[89][90] In addition, they use two alphabets that perfectly match each other (Latin and Cyrillic), thanks to Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić.
  
• The list of 100 words of the basic Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin vocabulary, as set out by Morris Swadesh, shows that all 100 words are identical.[91] According to Swadesh, 81 per cent are sufficient to be considered as a single language.[92]
  
• Typologically and structurally, these standard variants have virtually the same grammar, i.e. morphology and syntax.[93][94]
  

And that's coming from the Croatian side of the debate. The "different languages" angle hinges entirely on the argument that they were kinda-sorta never called the same thing historically.

Maps
Where Shtokavian is spoken as the main dialect (Note: in Kosovo/Romania/Hungary it doesn't mean it's the main language spoken, just that those who do speak it speak shtokavian.) The Adriatic islands and north-western Croatia speak Kajkavian and Chakavian which are transitional towards Slovenian.

Ethno-political division of the language as of 2006

Dialect distribution prior to 16th century migrations

Torlakian (my dialect, transitional towards Bulgarian and Macedonian)

The maps overstate the extent of Torlakian in Serbia and Kajkavian/Chakavian in Croatia. You can think of them as "furthest reach of influence" but it'd be like claiming the whole Republic of Ireland as the Irish Gaelic speaking area.

And with that I think I will stop Balkansposting for a while.