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SLP 'Telephone' Maps and Graphics Game 3

So having received what turned out to be the first map of this entire thing, I immediately assumed 'A-H goes Syria in 2020' and bounced through a few ideas- wikipedia style civil war maps for some areas, some sort of emergent state based around an Austrian-ruled Serbia/Montenegro.

Then I realised that a divided Italy would probably mean that Venice would be using the Venetian Language rather than the Italian language, and sort of spring-boarded off from that into an Italian language map with the assumption that there's no such thing as standard Italian.

So having drawn the whole of Italy out, plotted official languages, then spent over a week just doing Tuscany, I came to the conclusion I needed to just pull an extract out and send it on (I'll finish the rest later).

So I extracted this (and apparently substituted Parma for Mantua), and then sent it on to @Indicus.

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I determined that since in OTL people were talking of a single "Italian language" quite early, and that since Tuscan was its standard since the time of Dante, that this must be some sort of centuries-old POD, in which the Italian language gets balkanized. I also noticed that Corsica wasn't coloured in the Tuscan colour. Now, the Corsican language is very close to Tuscan, and in OTL there has been some dispute over whether it's a dialect of Tuscan or not. This closeness led the great Corsican nationalist Pasquale Paoli to promote the Italian language, and he viewed himself as Italian in the wider sense. I decided that there had to be some political reason for Corsican not to be considered a dialect of Tuscan.

A political reason, such as a war of independence from a Tuscan-speaking country.

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This having a centuries-old POD, I decided to show this by having the Dutch Republic still exist and able to project power into the Mediterranean. In the scenario I thought out, Tuscany had desires to expand to all Tuscan-speaking lands - this defeat marked a major obstacle of those plans, and its increasing alignment with Austria in order to gain the military strength to take them over. But evidently, as the Tuscan language map shows, those plans failed.

Then I sent over the wikibox to @Gary Oswald
 
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So I thought that we were dealing with Italian unification not happening. And I wondered what football tournament might result.

And I was last so sent this to noone.
 
For me, I received a propaganda leaflet (or so I thought) regarding the collapse of the Austrian Empire in 2021, a bit Syria-style. This all made me think also of a much stronger Habsburg domain in general. The only thing I had clear was that I wanted to make some sort of The Economist-style thing, and I ran through several ideas, including showing the level of democracy of the post-collapse states but reasoned it would have been too early to have definite borders.

So instead I decided to look at how a neighbouring, Habsburg-dominated state reacted to the inflow of likely refugees from the internal strife of Austria.

I originally thought to also show the ethnic makeup of the refugees per province but I wasn't too happy about how it looked so I decided against it.

And so this little thing came to be. And then I sent it off to @Alex Richards

j3egKYG.png

Very good! Looks indistinguishable from something they'd print in The Economist. John Grimond would be proud.

Very much enjoyed this time around as well. In particular liked the fairly seamless transition from Germany to Austria-Hungary down to Italy.
 
relishing the fact that, narrative bias taken into account (and either some really fluid border change from 2020 to 2022 or very arbitrary Italian football regions) none of this technically, I think, contradicts, instead existing in one beautiful timeline where Conan Doyle went "right, well at least my readership in [THE SURVIVING DUTCH REPUBLIC] is sick of him"
 
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