GlottoScope provides a visualisation of the combination of Agglomerated Endangerment Scale (AES) and Most Extensive Description of the languages of the world (but since descriptive status can only be reliably computed from Glottolog data for spoken L1 languages and sign languages, we only display these).
GlottoScope was designed and developed by Robert Forkel and Harald Hammarström in 2014. Comments and beta-testing were provided by a number of individuals including Hedvig Skirgård, Martin Haspelmath, Matti Miestamo, Mark Dingemanse, Lyle Campbell, Tapani Salminen and audiences at several demo sessions.
For more information see Harald Hammarström and Thom Castermans and Robert Forkel and Kevin Verbeek and Michel A. Westenberg and Bettina Speckmann 2018.
The Agglomerated Endangerment Status measures how endangered a language is. Originally, most of the endangerment assessments were aggregated from The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) , UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger and Ethnologue. Over time, assessments from other sources were included as well. For a full list of sources, see AES sources in the Glottolog repository.
| AES status | # of languages | % of languages |
|---|---|---|
| not endangered | 2719 | 35.13% |
| threatened | 1544 | 19.95% |
| shifting | 1795 | 23.19% |
| moribund | 412 | 5.32% |
| nearly extinct | 299 | 3.86% |
| extinct | 970 | 12.53% |
| total: | 7739 |
The descriptive status of a language measures how extensive a grammatical description there exists for a language.
For the purpose of the descriptive status Glottolog's regular document types are mapped a more coarse grained Most Extensive Description (MED) type as follows:
| MED type | Description | # of languages | % of languages |
|---|---|---|---|
| long grammar | Grammar with more than 300 pages | 1904 | 24.15% |
| grammar | Grammar with less than 300 pages | 1027 | 13.03% |
| grammar sketch | Grammar sketch | 1957 | 24.83% |
| phonology/text | New Testament, Text, Phonology, (typological) Study Of A Specific Feature or Dictionary | 1059 | 13.43% |
| Wordlist or less | Wordlist or less | 1936 | 24.56% |
| total: | 7883 |
Glottolog