About Glottolog

Credits

Glottolog is collaborative work.

Harald Hammarström collected many individuals' bibliographies and compiled them into a master bibliography.

Harald also collected extensive information about the proved genealogical relations of the languages of the world. His top-level classification is merged with low-level (i.e. dialect level) information from multitree.

Sebastian Nordhoff designed and programmed the database and the first version of the web application with help from Hagen Jung and Robert Forkel. He also took care of the import of the bibliographies.

Robert Forkel programmed the second version of the web application as part of the Cross Linguistic Linked Data project.

Martin Haspelmath gave advice at every stage throughout the project, helped with coordination, and is currently responsible for languoid names and dialects.

Sebastian Bank made numerous improvements to the code base for the Glottolog website and organized the import of several large bibliographies.

A table of source bibliographies for Glottolog is available at References information.

The Agglomerated Endangerment Status (AES) is derived from the databases of The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) , UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger and Ethnologue. For more information see GlottoScope.

Contributing

Glottolog data is curated in a public repository at https://github.com/glottolog/glottolog. Please consult the contribution guidelines for details.

You may also look at

https://github.com/glottolog/glottolog/releases
for information about released versions of Glottolog
https://github.com/glottolog/glottolog/issues
for a list of issues or errata reported for Glottolog data
https://github.com/glottolog/glottolog/pulls
for a list of proposed changes to Glottolog data

Publications

Academic publications which deal with Glottolog include:

2022
  • Harald Hammarström and Robert Forkel 2022.
    Glottocodes: Identifiers Linking Families, Languages and Dialects to Comprehensive Reference Information.
    https://content.iospress.com/articles/semantic-web/sw212843
    @article{swj-glottocodes,
      author  = {Harald Hammarström and Robert Forkel},
      journal = {Semantic Web Journal},
      number  = {6},
      pages   = {917-924},
      title   = {Glottocodes: Identifiers Linking Families, Languages and Dialects to Comprehensive Reference Information},
      url     = {https://content.iospress.com/articles/semantic-web/sw212843},
      volume  = {13},
      year    = {2022}
    }
2018
2012
  • Sebastian Nordhoff 2012.
    Linked Data for linguistic diversity research: Glottolog/Langdoc and ASJP.
    http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-3-642-28248-5
    @incollection{ldl-glottolog,
      address   = {Heidelberg},
      author    = {Sebastian Nordhoff},
      booktitle = {Linked Data in Linguistics. Representing and Connecting Language Data and Language Metadata},
      crossref  = {ldl2012},
      editor    = {Chiarcos, Christian and Nordhoff, Sebastian and Hellmann, Sebastian},
      pages     = {191-200},
      publisher = {Springer},
      title     = {Linked Data for linguistic diversity research: Glottolog/Langdoc and ASJP},
      url       = {http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-3-642-28248-5},
      year      = {2012},
      DOI       = {10.1007/978-3-642-28249-2},
      ISBN      = {978-3-642-28248-5}
    }
  • Christian Chiarcos and Sebastian Hellmann and Sebastian Nordhoff 2012.
    Linking linguistic resources: Examples from the Open Linguistics Working Group.
    http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-3-642-28248-5
    @incollection{ldl-llod,
      address   = {Heidelberg},
      author    = {Christian Chiarcos and Sebastian Hellmann and Sebastian Nordhoff},
      booktitle = {Linked Data in Linguistics. Representing and Connecting Language Data and Language Metadata},
      crossref  = {ldl2012},
      editor    = {Chiarcos, Christian and Nordhoff, Sebastian and Hellmann, Sebastian},
      pages     = {201-216},
      publisher = {Springer},
      title     = {Linking linguistic resources: Examples from the Open Linguistics Working Group},
      url       = {http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-3-642-28248-5},
      year      = {2012},
      DOI       = {10.1007/978-3-642-28249-2},
      ISBN      = {978-3-642-28248-5}
    }
  • Christian Chiarcos and Sebastian Hellmann and Sebastian Nordhoff 2012.
    Towards a Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud: The Open Linguistics Working Group.
    @article{ChiarcosEtAl2012tal,
      author  = {Christian Chiarcos and Sebastian Hellmann and Sebastian Nordhoff},
      journal = {Traitement Automatique des Langues},
      title   = {Towards a Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud: The Open Linguistics Working Group},
      year    = {2012}
    }
  • Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström 2012.
    Glottolog/Langdoc: Increasing the visibility of grey literature for low-density languages.
    @inproceedings{NordhoffEtAl2012lrec,
      author    = {Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of LREC 2012},
      title     = {Glottolog/Langdoc: Increasing the visibility of grey literature for low-density languages},
      year      = {2012}
    }
  • Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström 2012.
    Cataloguing linguistic diversity: Glottolog/Langdoc.
    @unpublished{NordhoffEtAl2012DH,
      author = {Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström},
      note   = {Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2012, July, Hamburg},
      title  = {Cataloguing linguistic diversity: Glottolog/Langdoc},
      year   = {2012}
    }
2011
  • Harald Hammarström and Sebastian Nordhoff 2011
    LangDoc: Bibliographic Infrastructure for Linguistic Typology
  • Hammarström, Harald and Nordhoff, Sebastian 2011
    How many languages have so far been described?
  • Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström 2011.
    Countering bibliographical bias with LangDoc, a bibliographical database for lesser-known languages.
    @unpublished{NordhoffEtAl2011ALT,
      author       = {Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström},
      howpublished = {Paper presented at the Association for Linguistic Typology 9th Biennial Conference, July, Hong Kong},
      title        = {Countering bibliographical bias with LangDoc, a bibliographical database for lesser-known languages},
      year         = {2011}
    }
  • Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström 2011
    Glottolog/Langdoc: Defining dialects, languages, and language families as collections of resources