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''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
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, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (german: Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte) performs basic research into archaeological science. The institute is one of 80+ research institutes of the Max Planck Society an ...
in
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, Germany). Its main curators include Harald Hammarström and Martin Haspelmath.


Overview

Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström created 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 the world's less-spoken languages. It differs from the similar catalogue ''
Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensi ...
'' in several respects: * It tries to accept 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 Spurious may refer to: * Spurious relationship in statistics * Spurious emission or spurious tone in radio engineering * Spurious key in cryptography * Spurious interrupt in computing * Spurious wakeup in computing * ''Spurious'', a 2011 novel b ...
" or "
unattested In linguistics, attested languages are languages (living or dead) that have been documented and for which the evidence (attestation) has survived to the present day. Evidence may be recordings, transcriptions, literature or inscriptions. In cont ...
". * It attempts only to classify languages into families which have been demonstrated to be valid. * Bibliographic information is provided, especially for lesser-known languages. * To a limited extent, alternative names are listed according to the sources which use them. The language names used in the bibliographic entries are identified by
ISO 639-3 ISO 639-3:2007, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages – Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages'', is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. It defines three-letter codes for ...
code or Glottolog's own code (Glottocode); apart from a single point-location on a map at its geographic centre, no ethnographic or demographic information is provided. External links are provided to ISO, ''Ethnologue'' and other online language databases The latest version is 4.7, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License in December 2022. It is part of the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project hosted by the
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (german: Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte) performs basic research into archaeological science. The institute is one of 80+ research institutes of the Max Planck Society an ...
.


Language families

''Glottolog'' is more conservative in its classification than most online databases in establishing membership of languages and groups within families but more liberal in considering unclassified languages to be isolates. Edition 4.7 lists 421 oral-language families and isolates as follows: Creoles are classified with the language that supplied their basic
lexicon A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or fo ...
. 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 (32) *Speech registers (15) *Sign languages (215, including 1 pidgin, 4 auxiliary sign systems, and 2 unclassified sign languages) *Unclassifiable attested languages (121) *Unattested languages (68) *Bookkeeping: spurious languages, such as retired ISO entries; kept for bookkeeping purposes (392 including 6 sign languages)


Notes


References


External links

* {{Cross-Linguistic Linked Data Linguistics websites * Bibliographic databases and indexes Linguistics databases Cross-Linguistic Linked Data