Jakub Marian: Map of ‘vegetarian friendliness’ (number of vegetarian restaurants) in Europe by country

The original idea of this article was to create a map showing the percentage of the population following a vegetarian diet, but it turned out to be impossible to find a reliable source of data for more than a handful of countries. Since there is correlation between supply and demand, I decided to create a map of the supply part instead (which, however, is affected by many other factors than just the percentage of vegetarians, e.g. tourism and overall wealth).

The following map is based on the number on entries at HappyCow, the largest directory of vegetarian restaurants in the world, and shows the number of vegetarian restaurants per 1 million inhabitants. It should be noted that the number can be somewhat misleading for tiny countries. For example, according to happycow.net, there is just one vegetarian restaurant in Andorra, but since it has only around 80,000 inhabitants, the figure shown here is “12.6 vegetarian restaurants per 1 million inhabitants”.

Note: The previous version of this map (from 2014) was inaccurate because it included also health food stores (which HappyCow includes in the number of listings shown for each country). To create the updated version, I checked the number of listings for all cities manually to make sure that only restaurants are included.

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Jakub Marian: Number of top-ranked universities by country in Europe

The map below shows the number of universities that are in the top 500 on the 2019 list. It should be noted that other university rankings (e.g. the QS World University Rankings) may use a different methodology, which may lead to different results. [...]

The map below solves this problem by calculating the number of students studying at top-500 universities divided by the population in thousands. For example, the figure 13.6 in Germany indicates that there are 13.6 students studying at a top 500 university per 1,000 people. [...]

As you can see, the playing field is much more level here, the champion being Iceland, which, despite its tiny size, has two top-500 universities.

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Jakub Marian: Nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments per capita by region in Europe

The map below shows the number of nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments (which includes hotels, holiday cottages, camping grounds, etc.) in a region divided by the number of people living in that region. In other words, it is a kind of tourists-to-residents ratio, including tourists from other parts of the same region. The map is based on data provided by Eurostat. There are no data for the UK, for some reason.

The map does not really do justice to some of the regions above the “10+” cut-off point. There are five regions with more than 50 nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments per capita (which means, essentially, that more than 50/365 ≈ 14% of their population are tourists, barring “intra-regional” tourism):

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Jakub Marian: Most studied foreign languages in lower secondary education in Europe

The map shows a few surprising facts. Spanish is more popular among pupils in Sweden and Norway than German (which is the third most commonly studied language there). Studying Danish (or, rarely, another Scandinavian language) is mandatory for Icelandic pupils. In Finland, both Finnish and Swedish are compulsory subjects in school, with the exception of children who speak neither of the two languages as their mother tongue. Learning a second foreign language seems to be rare in Austria, where less than 9% of pupils in lower secondary education study any language other than English.

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Jakub Marian: People killed in road accidents by region in Europe

The most dangerous roads in 2016 (excluding the non-European Turkish regions shown on the map) were in:  

The Northwestern region in Bulgaria (153 deaths per million)

Alentejo in Portugal (142 deaths per million)

Luxembourg (province) in Belgium (138 deaths per million) 

This is not just a random deviation; these regions have had a fairly high mortality rate (significantly higher than the rest of the respective countries) due to road accidents for several years.

As a general trend, the map shows that fatal traffic accidents tend to be significantly less common in large cities than in the countryside. This is likely due to the differences in speed on different types of roads (traffic in cities tends to be slower).

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Jakub Marian: Life expectancy at birth by region in Europe

The following map shows the life expectancy at birth of European countries by NUTS 2 regions (based on data by Eurostat from 2015). Eurostat does not collect data for all European countries; country-level statistics can be seen here.

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Jakub Marian: Wealth per adult by country in Europe

Credit Suisse recently published its annual wealth report (data tables here) comparing the wealth (net worth) of adults (as private individuals, i.e. not the wealth of the whole country divided by its population) in different countries.

Credit Suisse defines wealth = financial assets (e.g. bank deposits) + non-financial assets (e.g. real estate) – debt (if assets are less than debt, wealth can be negative). The map below shows estimates of the median wealth per adult by country, which is the middle value (50% own more, 50% own less):[...]

How do other major economies fare? The medians are (in 1000 USD): Japan 124, United States 56, China 6.7, Brazil 4.6, India 1.3.

It should be noted that wealth not synonymous with standard of living, which is better characterized by indicators such as purchasing power index and disposable income (because the cost of living and spending patterns differ from country to country).

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Jakub Marian: Pupil–teacher ratio in primary education by country in Europe

Teachers in developing countries generally have to handle many more children than teachers in developed countries, reaching a whopping 69.5 pupils per teacher in Malawi or 62.4 pupils per teacher in Chad, while no European country has more than 20 pupils per teacher in primary education (the map is based on data by UNESCO): [...]

For comparison, here are the corresponding values for other major nations: United States 14.5, China 16.3, Japan 16.4, Brazil 20.9, India 31.5. [...]

Another thing to note that the values include teachers and students in special education. Special-needs students generally work in smaller groups and have more teachers than regular students, which drives the average under the typical rate of regular students.

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Jakub Marian: Percentage of forest area by region in Europe

The LUCAS survey by Eurostat provided a lot of insight into land cover in the EU. As someone who likes to stroll in a forest, one of the statistics I found particularly interesting is the percentage of area covered by forests, which is what the following map shows:  [...]

If you really like forests, the direction you want to go is north. 68% of Finland and 64% of Sweden is covered by forests. However, Slovenia does not lag far behind with 61%.

The least forested country in Europe is Malta, with just 5% of forest area, followed by United Kingdom and Ireland (both 12%) and the Netherlands with 13%.

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Jakub Marian: Average hours worked per worker per week in Europe

The following map shows the number of hours workers in each country work per week, on average, including both full-time and part-time workers. It based on the following table by OECD (2016).

Here’s the methodology used: The total number of hours worked in the year 2016 in each country is divided by the number of people who worked during that year (which is what the OECD table shows) and then it is divided by 52.14 (the number of weeks in a typical year). The result is then rounded. 

The quantity shown in the map is unusual in that it is not immediately clear whether higher or lower numbers are better. However, since the number of hours worked is negatively correlated with other economic indicators that are generally considered positive, such as GDP per capita, I decided to show low numbers in green and high numbers in red: [...]

For comparison, other OECD members scored as follows (with the same methodology): Canada 33, Japan 33, United States 34, New Zealand 34, Israel 36, Chile 38, Korea 40, Mexico 43.

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Jakub Marian: European languages by number of native speakers

There are almost a hundred different languages spoken natively in Europe, but only about 40 of them have 1 million speakers or more. The map below shows estimates of the total number of native speakers for those languages. When a language is commonly spoken outside Europe, an estimate of the number of native speakers living in Europe and the total number of non-native (L2) speakers is also provided. [...]

Please note that there is no standardized way to divide German varieties into separate languages, so I divided them into 3 rough categories: Low German, West Central German (which includes Luxembourgish), and Alemannic German.

Figures preceded by the symbol “~”, as well as the numbers of L2 speakers, must be taken with a pinch of salt. The problem of estimating the number of native English and French speakers speakers is the large number of countries where the languages are widely spoken non-natively and the number of natives is unknown. Both Polish and Ukrainian have a large diaspora in many different countries. The situation of Ukrainian is further complicated by the existence of Surzhyk, which is a mix of Russian and Ukrainian spoken by around 15% of the Ukrainian population.

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Independent: These maps will change how you think about immigration

Earlier in the year, Jakub Marian, a Czech linguist, mathematician, and artist, made a series of maps on immigration, using UN data from 2010 to 2015.

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Jakub Marian: Europe: Unemployment Rate by Region in 2016

(All three conditions must be fulfilled simultaneously.) Simply put, an unemployed person is someone who currently does not have a job, is in principle capable of having a job, and is actively trying to find a job. Therefore, unemployment statistics do not include people who choose not to seek employment although they would be physically able to, but the number of such people is relatively low (less than 3% of total population in most countries), and a large fraction of them are full-time students.

The following map is based on data by Eurostat from 2016. Note that Eurostat provides annual unemployment rates based on a survey that takes place quarterly, without clearly explaining the methodology used (they probably take the average of the results):

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Jakub Marian: ‘Easter’ in European languages

The English word “Easter” (and similar words in several other Germanic languages) is derived from the name Eostre, a Germanic goddess called *Austrō in Proto-Germanic, and ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂ews-, meaning “dawn” or “east”.

The name (and many of the Easter customs celebrated around the world) may be of pagan origin, but, as we all know, the holiday is primarily a Christian holiday now, and this is reflected in the most common name of the holiday, derived from Latin Pascha, which ultimately derives from the Hebrew holiday Pesach, “Passover” (shown in red in the following map):

The holiday is mostly called either “Big Night(s)/Day(s)” (blue) or “Resurrection of Christ” (green) in Slavic languages. Interestingly, Latvian “Lieldienas” also means “Big Days”, but “Liel-” is not etymologically related to “Vel-” in Slavic languages.

Hungarian húsvét literally means “meat-taking”. Finnish pääsiäinen is derived from the verb päästä, which has many different meanings, one of which is “to escape” or “to be free”, referring to “being free from or finishing Lent”. Estonian ülestõusmispühad means “resurrection holiday”.

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Jakub Marian: Fertility rate by region in Europe

The total fertility rate is defined as the average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime if she were to survive from birth through the end of her reproductive life and experience the exact current age-specific fertility rates through her lifetime. This is a rather technical definition, so to put it bluntly: The total fertility rate tells us how many children per woman will be born, on average, if everyone keeps trying to have children at the same rate as they do now, according to their age.

The most important figure to keep in mind when discussing fertility rates is the so-called replacement rate (or “replacement-level fertility”). It is the fertility rate at which the size of the entire population will remain stable, when mortality is taken into account and migration ignored. The replacement rate is approximately 2.1 in most developed countries (that is, 9 out of 10 women should have two children and 1 out of 10 women should have three), but it is somewhat higher in developing countries due to higher mortality rates.

As you can see on the map below, the situation in Europe does not look very bright. Most of Europe is dying out—some regions, such as Galicia in Spain and Sardinia in Italy at extraordinarily low fertility rates close to 1 child per woman:

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Jakub Marian: Percentage of researchers by region in Europe

Researchers form an important pillar of society, creating long-term value upon which entrepreneurs as well as the public sector can build. The following map, based on Eurostat data, shows the percentage of employees that work as researchers by NUTS 2 region. [...]

In London, most researchers are concentrated in one small (but populous) part (which is barely visible on the map), while all other parts of London have less than 0.6% of researchers. On average, London boasts 1.0% of people employed in research.

The data for the two missing regions of Germany are not present in the Eurostat database, and the entries are marked as “confidential”, whatever that means. Perhaps everybody in Niederbayern and Oberpfalz secretly works on a death ray?

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Jakub Marian: 5 weird things you didn’t know about time zones

To understand the examples below, note that time zones are defined relative to the UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), which, roughly speaking, corresponds to time measured in London, UK (if we ignore Daylight Saving Time). By the way, the abbreviation UTC is yet another historical oddity: English speakers wanted the abbreviation to be CUT, whereas French speakers wanted TUC (“temps universel coordonné”). UTC emerged as a compromise between the two—so it, in fact, does not stand for anything. [...]

If you look carefully, you will notice that Nepal lies in an even weirder time zone: UTC+5:45. If you cross the border from India to Nepal, you will have to set the time on your watch 15 minutes forward, and if you move just 150 km (93 mi) further north and cross the Chinese border, the time suddenly jumps 2 hours and 15 minutes forward. [...]

China is a huge country, spanning about 5000 km (3100 mi) from east to west, which is more than the continental United States (excluding Alaska). As you can see from the map below, the neighbouring countries of China (most notably Russia) manage to squeeze 7 different time zones (from UTC+5 to UTC+11) into the same geographical span, while China officially uses just one. [...]

If you travel 180 degrees of longitude from London in either of the two possible directions, you will end up in the same spot on the other side of the globe. This means that the UTC+12 and UTC–12 time zones should theoretically cover the same area… but they are 24 hours apart. This is why this time zone is split into two “sub-zones” of equal width (fully applying only in international waters), one being 12 hours ahead of London and the other being 12 hours behind.

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Jakub Marian: Special characters (diacritics) used in European languages

The “Basic Latin Alphabet”, as defined by ISO, consists of the following 26 letters and their uppercase variants (and is identical to the standard English alphabet):

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

However, English is the only modern major European language that uses the Latin alphabet without any additional letters formed by adding diacritical marks or completely new symbols. Although the letter “é” may be used in words like “café” and “fiancée”, it is usually replaced by “e”. Similarly, the diaeresis (two dots) is sometimes used, e.g. “naïve”, but such usage is rare. Such rarely used symbols are written in parentheses in the following map.

On the other hand, some basic Latin letters (e.g. W and X) are only used in recent loanwords in many European languages (these are written in square brackets in the following map).

The following map shows a list of special characters used for each national European language (minority and regional languages are not included, because they often do not have completely established orthographies and there are simply too many to fit into a map). Note that not all of the characters shown in the map are considered “letters” of the alphabet; for example, the character “á” is a separate letter in the Czech alphabet but not in the Spanish alphabet.

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Jakub Marian: Emigration in Europe: Destination countries and percentages of emigrants

Last year, I published a map showing the current state of immigration in Europe. However, I realized that the data contained in the 2015 UN study could also be analysed the other way around—rather than the numbers and most common countries of origin of immigrants, it is possible to create a map showing the numbers of emigrants and the most common destinations of emigrants.

And this is exactly what this article is about. The following map shows the number of people who emigrated from a given country, as a percentage of its current population (or, more precisely, population in 2015). Let me clarify this with an example: The population of Poland in 2015 was approximately 38,612,000, according to the UN, and the number of people born in Poland who lived in a different country was 4,449,000, hence the figure 4,449,000/38,612,000 ≈ 11.5%: [...]

It is also worth noting that the UN data are based on the place of birth, not citizenship or ethnicity. This means, for example, that a German citizen born to a German family living in Poland who later moved from Poland to Germany would count as an emigrant from Poland, even though he or she has never been a Polish citizen.

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Jakub Marian: ‘January’ in European languages

The English word “January” comes from Latin ianuarius, which means “of Janus” (Janus was an ancient Roman god of doorways, gates, transitions, beginnings, and endings). The corresponding names for the first month of the year in other European languages are also mostly derived from ianuarius (shown in red in the following map):

Other etymologies are as follows: Polish, Ukrainian, and Croatian words styczeń, січень, and siječanj trace back to Proto-Slavic *sěčьńь, which referred to a time when trees were being cut down. Czech leden is derived from led, “ice”, and Belarusian студзень comes from a Slavic root meaning “cold” (note, however, that Russian is also commonly spoken in Belarus). Lithuanian sausis comes from sausas, “dry”. Scottish Gaelic Faoilleach comes from faol (“wolf”) and teach (“burrow”).

Finally, the Turkish, Finnish, and Basque translations are not related to any word mentioned above, which should not surprising, since they are not Indo-European languages. Turkish ocak literally means “stove, fireplace”, likely referring to the fact that January is a cold month, during which one spends a lot of time at home, in front of a fireplace. Finnish tammikuu comes from tammi (“heart, core”) and kuu (“month”), as January the “centre” of winter. Basque urtarril comes from urte (“year”) and berri (“new”).

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