Trying to look up names for settlements that fit the primary culture of it inhabitants (especially for the Old Northwest as many of the initial settlers IOTL were Anglophone Americans that simply won't be as widespread ITTL
Was there a St. Pierre somewhere on the map? That was another of the forts established by the French in North America IOTL.
Polandball representing the different kind of accent amongst different langages (I might be wrong in a few of them tho)
Hello from Quarantine! To explain my long absence, I moved at the end of January. The desktop computer where I do all my maps and such got packed into boxes. And there it remains, since in the new place I still don't have a desk. I didn't feel right using a laptop from work to do alternate history, but hey, now we're all in Quarantine. I assume workplaces everywhere are going to be pretty lenient about how we use these things.
I love that the world of the ASB has just continued to grow without me, that it doesn't need me to flourish. I'll be brushing up on what I missed and try not to get in the way of it. For now I'm just responding to the Polandball comics.
Thanks so much. All the comics you've created are a joy. The only thing I'd change is using "Yankee" to describe Pennsylvania and the other middle-latitude states. Yankee in TTL is synonymous with New Englander. I don't know what other term would work for that panel ... OTL linguists use the term "Midland" for a similar region, that might work in a pinch.
So a native of Pennsylvania would be called a Midlander?
Also what's the deal with the Russian possessions in Thrace, Cyprus, the Heptanese, etc? Did anyone sketch those places out? In case they were open, I asked around some ex-members I know and still keep in touch with. A Russian conquest of C-Town is difficult to figure out. It's not Kars, it's not Samarkand, it's not Crimea. How they rule it will need some real out of the box thinking and for them to tread lightly especially when all of still Anatolia appears to be Muslim-held solely going off the Commonwealth's map. Best I could squeeze out of those ex-members is that the odds of the Russians making Constantinople and its environs its own state are pretty high and the ruler would be a Romanov married to some princess from rent-a-royal German principality services, LLC. No one's going to be happy with Russian rule except the Slavic minority of the City and then the many Slavic villagers in Thrace. Certainly not the Romans and the Muslims. A lot of people in 1821 remember the Orlov Revolt and the betrayal. What time period are we looking at? Sometime around the real life Catherine the Great's reign in my opinion is best, so about 1762-1796 if not earlier. The 1700's are when the Balkans really accelerated its islamization. I read somewhere that Albania was still anywhere from .5-5% Muslim even between 1700-1750. Maybe the tsars can throw all that new Polish and Swede manpower at the war machine in their quest for the city.
LORDSHIP OF THE SALT LAKE¹
The Lordship of the Salt Lake was the lovechild of a wide amount of fur-trappers within the uninhabited and exploited areas of Northern Mexico. The first major leader of colonial efforts was Lord Peter Ogden², who settled Fort Henry (named after the then-British King William Henry, crowned William IV)³ in 1830. This fort, which later became Henrysville, served as a central meeting point for fur traders of all origins, attracting most thoroughly the trappers of Rupertia and of French America. These groups often intermingled with the Natives of the nearby watersheds and freshwater lakes, such as the Goshute, the Shoshone, and the Ute. Following the establishment of the piecemeal California, the Rupertian presence in the region strengthened and solidified, and inspired by states such as Russian California and New Albion, the Lordship of the Salt Lake became heavily associated with Rupertia, sometimes even being called Rupertian California.
Despite Henrysville being its current capital⁴, the largest city in Salt Lake is the French-settled Carrefour (literally "Crossroads" in French) along the coast of the Great Salt Lake, whose unique location along the huge saline lake makes it hugely popular among tourists. It is a parliamentarian state, with the head of state being the non-elected Lord, who is instead decided by the government in Rupertia.
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1. The flag's incredibly makeshift, but it uses the colors of the Canadian flag (I know there's no flag of Rupertia, but I felt it was safe to assume it might use the colors of our Canadian flag).
2. His title of Lord was given to him after he founded Fort Henry.
3. Name due to change, as British kings are probably different ITTL
4. Approximately Ogden, Utah. Carrefour is where Salt Lake City is.
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It's short, but that's a rough idea of what I was thinking. Feel free to trash it completely, it's just some thoughts I juggled together.
I did some math on native languages in the ASB. I made up a spreadsheet with some basic assumptions to make some broad estimates and I looked at multilingualism statistics for Quebec, Belgium, and Luxembourg to make this:
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While urban areas are generally multilingual, where inhabitants may regularly use two or three languages on a daily basis, rural areas are often more isolated; in many smaller communities, monolingualism is the norm. As a result, while the average number of spoken languages is 3.2 in New Amsterdam and 2.3-2.8 in other cities, rural areas are estimated to range from 1.1 to 2.5, depending on geography. Across the whole ASB, the number of languages spoken is around 1.9, though the majority of ASB residents have a basic grasp of at least 3.
Other languages
German is the most popular "foreign language" as defined by the census office. In addition to the longstanding German-speaking communities stretching from Pennsylvania to Pays-d'en-Haut, German is also the most popular language taught in schools aside from Confederal languages. German is sometimes called an "old immigrant" language, because most of its speakers in the ASB are native-born. It shares this distinction with Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Welsh, and others.
Immigrant languages are a growing part of the ASB's linguistic landscape. In the past few decades, speakers of languages such as Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Nahuatl, Hindi, and other languages have grown rapidly due to increased immigration from "non-traditional" countries. The majority of learners of these languages are the children or spouses of native speakers.
Ah that's OK. I don't know what @False Dmitri's cooking up lately, but I think it'll be great.
I think someone already did that. You could try and snoop around this thread if you want.
We've tiptoed around this topic before. If you have solid ideas about modern-day immigration to the ASB, feel free to share! It appears that a good deal of immigration is from the North American family of nations, which is of course a natural place to look first.
That's certainly something I can help with. For Ohio, there indeed are maps with town names. They're generally historic maps rather than contemporary ones, but the principal towns from that era have endured as centers of government and settlement. This is the only one I have access to at the moment, but it can be a starting point.Unfortunately, I don't really have a full list of city names (especially for Illinois and Ohio). Maybe @False Dmitri can help
Well the map, at least, is mostly filled in. The list of countries, from the wiki, is:I've been working on this bit little by little, although I've been somewhat avoiding the new-world nations because I'm still not sure about the status of South America.