Which European language am I reading

Geoguessr players: Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power
- as a geoguessr player this is actually very helpful and i sent it to our group chat
- The source is the geoguessr subreddit

This is awesome! Never occurred to me that you can tell languages (whose writing systems are similar to each other) apart just by analyzing its graphemes while ignoring grammar entirely

I dunno it's all Greek to me mate

If you say "yes" to everything, you end up with Vepsian. If you say "no" to everything, you end up with Bulgarian.
- That's only because of the order they're in though. I wonder which ones is the most yes and most no without order.

Ah yes, of course, I am familiar with the endonyms of all these uncommon languages and their (not always unique) associated flags.
- That's like half the fun, trying to figure out what the languages might be, based on the other languages near them and just guessing what those letters might be in English or whatever other languages you know.
  But yes, it absolutely is difficult, especially with many regions being demarked, which I've probably never heard of.

Nice touch including esperanto.
- I tried learning Esperanto through Duolingo, but was a bit disappointed. It was still a bit inconsistent here and there; I was hoping for a 'perfect' language without exceptions.
  Still think it's a great initiative though.
  
  Yes, it's not flawless. My personal pet peeve is that there's no clear way to know if a verb is transitive or intransitive. Despite the shortcomings, it's a fun and rewarding language to learn.
- Esperanto also has the hideous ĥ which to my knowledge no other language has, but it’s not very common so it’s usually not something you can identify it by.
  
  Ĥaoso manĝu vin, fiulo! Estas la plej bona litero ĥ!
  
  What sound does that make?

gonna coin the English word "milieuwise" - as in "to move towards, or be appropriate for, the current environment" and fuck this chart up.
edit: no need, found the error - on the bottom line you get to English by saying no to "chh" but it appears in hitchhiking, beachhead, witchhood, and, humorously, touchholes.
- I feel like 'chh' would only count when pronounced as part of one syllable/sound. Which in all your examples isn't the case. Of course, if someone is not at all familiar with the language they wouldn't be able to make that distinction. So the chart still wouldn't be helpful in that case.
  
  The key point for me is "what am I reading" - where pronunciation doesn't enter into it.
  This isn't a guide for spoken, but for written language, so it actually doesn't matter where the phoneme break occurs, only the grapheme
- Seriously.
  Now I'm no scholar, but categorising English as part of the Celtic-branch is just ridoinkulous to me. Like-- that might have been true since before the Roman conquest, but Modern English is easily a West-Germanic branch, overlaid with Norman French, starting in 1066.
  
  It's not so much about classification than finding a place to identify it using a suite of yes/no branches based on specific graphems.
  German and Dutch are very close languages, but in complete different places in this tree.

I don't know who they are but I like Frysk's flag.
- Frisia! It's a province of the Netherlands and I think their language is the closest one to English
  
  Closest to Anglic languages (English, Scots & I think some creoles?) in terms of ancestry - I think Danish is actually the closest to English due to the influence of old norse on English though? Or it could just be coincidence in how they evolved?, and part of the Anglo-Frisian family which means it's pretty closely related
- If you like the West Frisian flag wait until you see North Frisia's coat of arms. That's a pot of (red?) grit there, and the motto is "Better dead than slave". Just don't try to conquer them and they're perfectly pleasant to be around with and share a state with, rather cooking grit than looking for trouble. (Not identical to the coat of the district of Nordfriesland, that's quite a bit more territory than North Frisia proper).
- The heart shaped figures you are seeing, actually depict leaves of waterlilies.

Yiddish is spelled left to right on this, it should be right to left, like this: יידיש

I enjoy how there's a language called "iron".
- Its a solid language, but im a bit rusty with it.
  Sorry, im leaving.

Maybe if Low Saxon could finally agree on an orthography we could be in that chart. It's currently split between "Use Dutch orthography", which doesn't work, "use German orthography", which doesn't work, and I guess "use English orthography", which also doesn't work. Technically there should also be a Cyrillic version and who knows with as big as the Diaspora is there's probably a Portuguese version in Brazil.
I vote for this one.
- I'm in. Take my upvote!

Why is “ø y” a no for Denmark, but a yes for Norway? I’m pretty sure both countries have the same alphabet?
- it's not "ø", "y", it's "øy" in combination (as a digraph?)
  same as "th" further down not implying the N languages don't have "t" or "h", just that they don't have "th"
  
  Aha thanks for the explanation.
- The "øy" is written without a space between the letters, which seems to mean that these letters occur together in words (more obvious example: "eau" leads into French).
  
  The problem is that we can put words together to form new words. So say I produced a yogurt at a lake(sø) , I could call it søyougurt. It's not a word that would be in a dictionary though, but lots of that kind of words aren't.

what does "b G R v" mean
- "Am I seeing those in what I reading".

French is a strange one here - they have "w" (double vé in the alphabet) but it's used almost exclusively in loan words. So I'm not certain it's determinative the way it's presented here.
- I think that choice is more about "ieuw" as a whole, like "nieuw" in Dutch, not the separate 4 letters (like b G R v at the beginning)
- I don't get your comment. The "w" isn't used in this graph as a single character.
  
  The Dutch exclusion makes sense to me. I was reading it as separate letters which made the use of "e" a second time redundant.

I kinda broke it with å

Czech here, was a bit surprised to see Ř in another language, because I was lead to belive it was unique to my language. Turns out the pronunciation is, but the letter it self does show up elsewhere.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%98
However what I find is that Ř is in Upper Sorbian, not Lower like the graph in the post implies. And Ů doesn't seem to be in either.
- A surprising amount of speakers of Spanish have an ř sound, usually in place of the normal trill. Specifically, it's present in New Mexican Spanish (spoken in New Mexico & Colorado), Amazonic Spanish/"Jungle Spanish" and influenced dialects (spoken in Ecuador, Peru, parts of eastern Bolivia, Paruguay, northern Chile, northern Argentinia, the Colombian highlands, and I think south Venezuela), Guatemala, and Costa Rica.
  Specifically, the sound is called a voiced alveolar fricative trill. The IPA symbol is [r̝].
  It's said to be due to imported influence from northern Spain (Basque Country, Navarra, La Rioja), where the same sound is also present, and varyingly from the influence of various local Native American languages, some of which in the areas have/had the sound.
  In some of those dialects, a pronunciation like [ʐ] may be used instead, which I think is similar to what's spelled ż/rz in Polish. The pronunciation can weaken further into [ɹ̝], which might be hard to distinguish from the r sound of some English speakers, or even more to [ɹ] which is similar to the r sound in some English speech.
  
  Fascinating, thanks for the info! Much appreciated!

As a german, I feel the right side is much more alien to me than the left side (split at "Start here").
Is that circumstancial, or does it reflect some linguistic truth? Like, are the languages on the left one family, and the ones on the right another family, or however linguistic taxonomy would call that?
Maybe it's just that the left side includes all the germanic languages, so that feels more familiar. There are also languages on the left side where I have no clue what or where that might be. But much more so on the right side.
- Like yeah, the first split is about having a number of common letters from the Latin alphabet, so the right side is everything else: Cyrillic, Hebrew, …

Geoguessr pros have this memorized I assume
- Thankfully, European countries are only a few kilometers across, so even if you just eyeball it, it's usually not too far off.
  
  You have never seen professional geoguessr players. Consider yourself lucky, its amazing to watch them for the first time. I can recommend the youtubers rainbolt, zigzag or geowizard as an oldschool player.

Swiss German doesn't have orthography and üü can absolutely appear.
Edit: They meant Schriftsprache/Schriftdeutsch, which is almost German but without the ß.
- AfaIk, Schweizer Hochdeutsch is not Schwizerdütsch, but a variety of standard German, with the replacement ß->ss.
  
  The language is a variety of German. But there are no real writing rules. Text you see written in Switzerland, e.g. on signage, is practically Hochdeutsch with the needed substitutions of words, like chicken for for example where they don't use the German word.
  Written language between people however has no rules and people write as they speak and that's definitely not Hochdeutsch.
  Edit: I just read your post again and maybe that's what you meant and I misunderstood you.
  
  Ah damn, you're probably right. Schriftdeutsch.
- Where does the diagram mention grammar?
  
  Orthography. I thought it was a subset of grammar, but no.

In primarily Irish speaking places you might find TH missing from the orthography entirely.
Similarly, I wonder if ä could show up in English. Such as in diäeresis.
- I was pointing out that there are contexts (such as signage) in which they often don’t. It is possible to write perfect Irish without ever using a TH. For example:
  “Go raiḃ maiṫ agat agus go n-éirí an boṫar leat”.
  There are indeed books you could open and not find a single instance of it.
- No. For that to be the case you'd need to start pronouncing stuff correctly.

https://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/
- Indeed, but most of the flags here represent the regions they are spoken in.
  Corse, Sardinia, Brittany, Occitania are not countries
  
  Interesting, thanks.

I just use my innate knowledge of my fellow Europeans to identify the language well enough to point in the general direction which it came from, or maybe using cardinal directions like "south" or "east"

The only source I found for the "kiillt saam" is this page. Was it meant to be Kildin Sámi?

I'm not sure what the c with a line on it is but Estonian (või siis Eesti keel) doesnt have it.
- Where do you see a 'c with a line on it'? Starting from the 'latin' branch, you end up with Estonian saying no to everything except ä and õ.
  
  First thing left from "start here"

Swedish doesn't have ø ffs
Edit: sorry my bad, its a "No" link, works as expected.
- The chart agrees with you..
- But then it's correct? Swedish is in the "no" branch for ø.

The swedish one is incorrect. It's ä and ö not æ and ø.
- Swedish is on the "no" branch of those letters