Comprehensive reference information for the world's languages, especially the lesser known languages.
Information about the different languages, dialects, and families of the world ('languoids') is available in the Languages and Families sections. The References section contains bibliographical information. You can query the bibliographical database by filtering the table view or using a complex query involving genealogical affiliation, document type, and macro-area.
Glottolog provides a comprehensive catalogue of the world's languages, language families and dialects. It assigns a unique and stable identifier (the Glottocode) to (in principle) all languoids, i.e. all families, languages, and dialects. Any variety that a linguist works on should eventually get its own entry. The languoids are organized via a genealogical classification (the Glottolog tree) that is based on available historical-comparative research (see also the Languoids information section).
The References section ('langdoc') provides a comprehensive collection of bibliographical data for the world's lesser known languages. It provides access to 432,361 references of descriptive works such as grammars, dictionaries, word lists, texts etc. Search criteria include author, year, title, country, and genealogical affiliation. References can be downloaded as txt, bib, html, or with the Zotero Firefox plugin.
Glottolog will be continuously expanded and improved with the help of their users. The input of expert linguists is crucial.
Glottolog is an initiative of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. It should be cited as follows:
Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian. 2024.
Glottolog 5.0.
Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10804357
(Available online at http://glottolog.org, Accessed on 2024-04-16.)
Particularly important contributors to the Langdoc database are Alain Fabre, Jouni Maho and SIL International. For more details, see the Credits page.
The data published by Glottolog is curated in the public GitHub repository glottolog/glottolog. The Glottolog web application at https://glottolog.org serves the latest released version of the data in this repository.
You may report errors you found in Glottolog using this repositories issue tracker.
Glottolog