Interactive visualization of the world’s documented languages, organized by family. Integrates hierarchy, speaker populations, typological features, and phoneme inventories from multiple linguistic databases.
Controls
Pan — drag or touch-drag
Zoom — scroll wheel or pinch
Expand — click any branch node
Hover — tooltip with details + lineage highlight
Uniform / Speaker Flow — toggle link rendering mode
Color Key
Data Sources
Glottolog — language family hierarchy, classification, and endangerment status. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Language Isolates & Small Families is a grouping used on this page, not a Glottolog family. The kinship globe is built directly from Glottolog 5.3.
Joshua Project — speaker estimates for 6,150+ languages, aggregated from people group data. First- and second-language speakers are combined, so figures are attributions rather than headcounts and sum to more than the world population.
WALS — World Atlas of Language Structures. Typological features (word order, tone, consonant inventories) across 3,500+ languages.
PHOIBLE 2.0 — phonological inventories (consonant and vowel counts) for 3,000+ languages.
Languages are linked across datasets by ISO 639-3 code and Glottocode.