Irish Language Map

A visual essay on who could speak Irish in each of Ireland's 32 counties, in every census from 1851 to 2022.

Live site: irishlanguagemap.org

It is a scrollytelling page. You scroll through chapters with animated maps and charts, answer the census question yourself, guess the numbers for your own county, and compare the north and south of the island.

Tech

• SvelteKit with adapter-static. Every page is pre-rendered to plain HTML at build time, so there is no server at runtime.
• Svelte 5, with a small shared state module in src/lib/state.svelte.js.
• D3 for the charts and the map camera, GSAP for motion, and rough.js for the hand-drawn annotations.
• No map library. The county map is a plain SVG, and the camera that flies to each step's counties is a D3 zoom tween on a single transform.

Run it locally

You need Node 22 or newer.

npm install
npm run dev

Command	What it does
npm run dev	Starts the dev server
npm run build	Builds the static site into build/
npm run preview	Serves the production build locally
npm run shapes	Regenerates the county SVG paths (runs automatically before dev and build)

Project layout

geo/                  County boundaries (GeoJSON)
scripts/              build-shapes.js: thins and projects the boundaries into SVG paths
static/               Fonts, images, favicon, CNAME
src/
  routes/             Home page, About, Methodology, sitemap, robots
  lib/
    components/       One component per chapter, plus Nav, Footer, Seo
    data/             Census figures (ability.json) and the census question text
    styles/           Global stylesheets
    *.js              Chart, map, colour and scroll helpers
.github/workflows/    GitHub Pages deployment

The chapters are Opener, CensusYou, StoryChart, MapChapter, NorthSouth, People, Guess and Conclusion. Scrolly.svelte is the shared scrollytelling section: the pinned graphic, the steps, and the caption box on phones.

Data

• Republic of Ireland: Central Statistics Office.
• Northern Ireland: compiled by Phelim Birch.
• County boundaries: Ordnance Survey Ireland and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.

The methodology page explains how the figures were put together and what changed between censuses.

Deployment

Pushing to main runs .github/workflows/pages.yml, which builds the site and publishes it to GitHub Pages. The custom domain is set in static/CNAME.

Licence

MIT © Alessio Coci