''Glottolog'' is a
bibliographic database
A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, ...
of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (german: Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie, shortened to MPI EVA) is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, that was founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Plan ...
in
Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...
, 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
Jena
Jena () is a German city and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a po ...
, Germany). Its main curators include
Harald Hammarström
Harald Hammarström (born 1977 in Västerås, Sweden) is a Swedish linguist. He is currently an Associate Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University. Hammarström is especially known for his extensive work on curating ''Glottolog'', a bibliographic dat ...
and
Martin Haspelmath
Martin Haspelmath (; born 2 February 1963 in Hoya, Lower Saxony) is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he worked from 199 ...
.
Overview
Sebastian Nordhoff
Sebastian may refer to:
People
* Sebastian (name), including a list of persons with the name
Arts, entertainment, and media
Films and television
* ''Sebastian'' (1968 film), British spy film
* ''Sebastian'' (1995 film), Swedish drama film
...
and
Harald Hammarström
Harald Hammarström (born 1977 in Västerås, Sweden) is a Swedish linguist. He is currently an Associate Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University. Hammarström is especially known for his extensive work on curating ''Glottolog'', a bibliographic dat ...
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'' 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 ...
" 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
The Cross-Linguistic Linked Data (CLLD) project coordinates over a dozen linguistics databases covering the languages of the world. It is hosted by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary An ...
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 {{About, , the linguistics term dealing with languages unrelated to any other language in the world, Language isolate, other uses, Isolate (disambiguation){{!Isolate
Isolates is a term used in developmental psychology and family studies, to describ ...
. Edition 4.7 lists 421
oral-language families and isolates as follows:
Creoles are classified with the language that supplied their basic
lexicon.
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