About the data and how the atlas was made
The atlas is built on open databases put together by linguists from all over the world. Here is where everything comes from, what is certain and what is only an estimate.
What is on the globe
Each dot is one language. The list of languages comes from Glottolog, an open database of the world's languages run by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The atlas takes everything Glottolog lists as a language and gives a location: 7,967 languages.
A dot stands where Glottolog places the language, usually in the middle of the area where it is spoken. Even a language spoken all over the world has just one dot, at its home.
Left out are only Glottolog's special bins: bookkeeping entries, languages known only by name and languages we know so little about that they cannot be classified. Esperanto, Interlingua and Interslavic have no dot because they did not arise in any one place; they are still in the list and in search.
Language or dialect?
There is no sharp line between a language and a dialect, and history and politics often play a part. The atlas follows Glottolog's decisions. That is why Bavarian has a dot but Australian English does not – Glottolog counts it as a variety of English. Dialects are listed on the language card, and searching for one finds its language.
Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are very easy to understand for each other's speakers and rest on the same dialect base, Shtokavian. Linguistically they are close standard varieties of one shared language; officially and socially they are separate languages today. Glottolog lists them as one language, Serbo-Croatian, which has a dot on the globe. The atlas also has Serbian and Croatian as separate languages with a greeting, but they have no dot of their own. Hmong, on the other hand, is several languages in Glottolog and one entry in the atlas. That is why the list has 7,970 entries and the globe 7,967 dots.
163 languages with a greeting
163 languages have a greeting, a pronunciation guide, a fun fact, a number of speakers and the area where they are spoken. All of this is written by hand. The fun facts are for children, but they have to be true and they are checked.
The pronunciation guide is only an approximation. Speaker numbers are rounded estimates and include people who learned the language.
The orange area on the globe is drawn by hand and approximate, not measured. There is no open data with exact language borders for the whole world.
The Listen button uses the voice your computer or phone has. For some languages it has none.
The painted postcards show the typical landscape and buildings of the region the language comes from. They are not pictures of particular places.
Details for the other languages
Vitality: the UNESCO scale (safe to extinct) based on Glottolog data.
Grammar (word order, cases, tones…): WALS, the World Atlas of Language Structures.
Number of sounds: PHOIBLE. Sample text: Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR in Unicode).
Speaker numbers: Wikidata; where missing, an estimate from Unicode CLDR.
Relatives and the family tree: the Glottolog tree, with Glottolog's branch names.
Nothing is made up: if a source has no data, the card does not show it.
Map
Country borders and land come from Natural Earth (simplified, scale 1:110 million). Relief and the sea floor come from Natural Earth and NOAA ETOPO1.
Data versions and licences
| Glottolog – languages, families, vitality, dialects | downloaded 22 September 2026 | CC BY 4.0 |
| WALS Online (2013) – grammar | downloaded 23 September 2026 | CC BY 4.0 |
| PHOIBLE 2.0 – sounds | downloaded 23 September 2026 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
| Wikidata – speaker numbers | downloaded 22 September 2026 | CC0 |
| Unicode CLDR 48 – language names, estimates | Unicode License | |
| UDHR in Unicode – sample texts | udhr package 6.0.0 | MIT |
| Natural Earth, NOAA ETOPO1 – map and relief | public domain |