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Glottolog

Producer	Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Germany)
Languages	English
Access
Cost	Free
Coverage
Disciplines	Linguistics
Links
Website	glottolog.org

Glottolog is an open-access online bibliographic database of the world's languages. In addition to listing linguistic materials (grammars, articles, dictionaries) describing individual languages, the database also contains the most up-to-date language affiliations based on the work of expert linguists.

Glottolog was first developed and maintained at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Its main curators include Harald Hammarström and Martin Haspelmath.

Overview

Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström established the Glottolog/Langdoc project in 2011. The creation of Glottolog was partly motivated by the lack of a comprehensive language bibliography, especially in Ethnologue.

Glottolog provides a catalogue of the world's languages and language families and a bibliography on individual languages. It differs from Ethnologue in several respects:

• It includes only those languages that the editors have been able to confirm both exist and are distinct. Varieties that have not been confirmed, but are inherited from another source, are tagged as "spurious" or "unattested".
• It attempts only to classify languages into families demonstrated to be valid groupings based on research by linguists specializing in them.
• Comprehensive bibliographic information is provided, especially for lesser-known or underdescribed languages.
• To a limited extent, alternative names are listed according to the sources that use them.
• Apart from a single point-location on a map at its geographic centre, no ethnographic or demographic information is provided.

Language names used in the bibliographic entries are identified by ISO 639-3 code or Glottolog's own code (Glottocode). External links are provided to ISO, Ethnologue and other online language databases

The latest version is 5.0, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License in 2024.

It is part of the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

Language families

Glottolog is more conservative in its classification than other databases in establishing membership of languages and families given its strict criteria for postulating larger groupings. On the other hand, the database is more permissive in terms of considering unclassified languages as isolates. Edition 4.8 lists 421 spoken language families and isolates as follows:

Creoles are classified with the language that supplied their basic lexicon.

In addition to the families and isolates listed above, Glottolog uses several non-genealogical families for various languages:

• Pidgins (84 languages)
• Mixed languages (9)
• Artificial languages (31)
• Speech registers (15)
• Sign languages (223)
• Unclassifiable attested languages (121)
• Unattested languages (68)
• Bookkeeping: spurious languages, such as retired ISO entries; kept for bookkeeping purposes (390 including 6 sign languages)

Notes

1. See for example the bookkeeping section for ISO languages that Glottolog has deemed to be spurious distinctions.
   This discrimination does not apply to dialects, many of which have been inherited from MultiTree or other sources without verification.
2. Sign languages are listed together, including those grouped typologically as village sign languages, as are pidgins and unclassified languages, but without a claim that they are necessarily related.
3. Geographic regions include "Papunesia" (a portmanteau of Papua (New Guinea) and Austronesia), which refers to the islands of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania, excluding Australia. Here it is replaced with 'Oceania'.

References

1. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald (May 2012). "Glottolog/Langdoc:Increasing the visibility of grey literature for low-density languages" (PDF). Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12). Istanbul: European Language Resources Association (ELRA): 3289–3294.
2. "About". Glottolog 4.8. Retrieved 2023-07-10.
3. Hammarström, Harald (2015). Kuzmin, E. (ed.). "Glottolog: A Free, Online, Comprehensive Bibliography of the World's Languages". Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in Cyberspace: 183–188.
4. "Cross-Linguistic Linked Data". Retrieved 2020-02-22.
5. "Glottolog Families". glottolog.org. Retrieved 2022-12-07.
6. "Glottolog: About Languoids". glottolog.org. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
7. "Pseudo Family: Sign Language". glottolog.org. Retrieved 2023-07-10.
8. "Glottolog Family: Bookkeeping". glottolog.org. Retrieved 2023-07-10.

External links

• Official website

• 2011 establishments in Germany
• Internet properties established in 2011
• Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
• Linguistics websites
• Language families
• Bibliographic databases and indexes
• Linguistics databases
• Cross-Linguistic Linked Data