GlottoScope

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.

Agglomerated Endangerment Status

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 2800 36.23%
threatened 1468 19.00%
shifting 1781 23.05%
moribund 412 5.33%
nearly extinct 304 3.93%
extinct 963 12.46%
total:7728

Descriptive Status

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 1887 24.00%
grammar Grammar with less than 300 pages 960 12.21%
grammar sketch Grammar sketch 2014 25.62%
phonology/text New Testament, Text, Phonology, (typological) Study Of A Specific Feature or Dictionary 1049 13.34%
Wordlist or less Wordlist or less 1952 24.83%
total: 7862