Atlas Linguarum Europae

The Atlas Linguarum Europae (literally "Atlas of the Languages of Europe", ALE in acronym) is a linguistic atlas project launched in 1970 with the help of Unesco, and published from 1975 to 2007. The ALE used its own phonetic transcription system, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet with some modifications. It covers six language families present on the European continent: Altaic, Basque, Indo-European, Caucasian, Semitic and Uralic; these families are divided into 22 linguistic groups comprising 90 languages and dialects. The data were collected in 2631 localities. The members of the ALE project are organized into 47 national committees and 4 committees for minority languages.
Roman Jakobson proposed a linguistic atlas for Europe in the late 1930s, but World War II disrupted this plan. The idea was revived by Mario Alinei at the Second International Congress of Dialectologists in 1965, and Alinei was still President of the ALE as late as 1997. Wolfgang Viereck took over as president between 1999 and 2005, and was then followed by Nicolae Saramandu. Alinei developed a theory that much of language is based on "magico-religious motivations", which he believed pre-dated the spread of Christianity and Islam to Europe. Viereck later wrote on the influence of religion on language.
It was the first computerised linguistic atlas. In England, the 66 sites had all been part of the earlier Survey of English Dialects. Viereck noted that the 1970s fieldwork of the ALE demonstrated widespread lexical erosion in English dialects since the SED (e.g. the word "icicle" had become universal in England and displaced other dialect words). Work in Ireland, Scotland and Wales covered both Celtic and Germanic dialects. The Germanic dialects of Scotland were classified as Scots, whereas those of Ireland and Wales were classified as English. Work in the Channel Islands only investigated Romance dialects.