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Printing of Vernacular Scripture, 1456-1968

This map shows the dates at which the first portion of scripture (e.g. the Gospel of Matthew) was published in a given language. It plots the location at which the language was spoken, or, in a small number of cases, where the printing took place. Points on the map are color-coded according to the word for ‘God’ used in the particular translation. Points are shaded gray when the word used for ‘God’ is not among the top twenty most frequently used words. The right-hand box allows you to filter the map by clicking on (or searching for) a given word. At the bottom the play button allows you to watch the spread of print translations over time. If information about the word used for ‘God’ was unavailable, the translation was left out of the data. Download the raw data here.

 

Data was compiled based on information available in the following sources:

  • St. John III, 16: In Some of the Languages and Dialects in Which the British & Foreign Bible Society Has Printed or Circulated the Holy Scriptures (London: Printed for the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1875).
  • John Sharp, The Gospel in Many Tongues (British and Foreign Bible Society, 1912).
  • British and Foreign Bible Society and Massachusetts Bible Society, The Gospel in Many Tongues: Specimens of 543 Languages in Which the British & Foreign Bible Society Has Published or Circulated Some Portion of the Word of God (London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1921)
  • British and Foreign Bible Society, The Gospel in Many Tongues: Specimens of 630 Languages in Which the British and Foreign Bible Society Has Published or Circulated Some Portion of the Word of God (London: The Society, 1930).
  • British and Foreign Bible Society, The Gospel in Many Tongues: Specimens of 875 Languages in Which the British and Foreign Bible Society Has Published Or Circulated Some Portion of the Bible (British and Foreign Bible Society, 1965).
  • Bernhard Pick, Translation of the Bible: A Chronology of the Versions of the Holy Scriptures Since the Invention of Printing (American Bible Society, 1913)
  • The Book of a Thousand Tongues. Revised Edition, ed. by Eugene Nida (London: United Bible Societies, 1972).