Humans Who Read Grammars

World map from Glottolog, each language is one dot and coloured by language family (or other top-genetic unit). Language families are the main way we categorise and understand the language diversity of the world. A language family is a group of languages that have been analysed as having one ancestor,  one great-great-great-and-yet-greater-grand-mother language. Indo-European is a language family, with the sub-groups of Romance, Germanic, Slavic etc. Maps are great tools for visualising information,  we're pretty map-nerdy on this blog.   Robert Forkel, one of the editors of Glottolog, kindly shared an interactive map of the world with languages plotted out and coloured by language family with me. This map is interactive, rendered in a web browser with and html and json file. This map is not available on the Glottolog site, but will later be implemented in the command-line interface.  You can see language families on the website by either selecting a co...

Big Think recently published an article titled "Half of All Languages Come from One Root Language. How it Spread Is Something of Debate" by Philip Perry .  This is a nice article that provides an introduction to the stormy debate on the origins of the Indo-European languages family to the public. It is always appreciated to see current research debate covered in popular press! T he article informs the reader that "half of the languages spoken today by some 3 billion people come from a single root language".  This is unfortunately  misleading, I'll provide some context here.  TL;DR Only 6% of the 7,000-ish languages alive today are Indo-European. However, 46% of people speak an Indo-European language. Languages are not evenly distributed across the population, i.e. not half of the world's languages are Indo-European even if almost half of people speak it. The writer is referring  to the Indo-European language family, the most studied and well-k...

Lists, lists, lists & posts  - we've  got lists and posts to make you happy!! The Ethnologue might be instituting restrictions, but many other parts of linguistics - especially documentation and descriptive, is getting more and more open! list of open access venues in linguistics post explaining open access and varieties of it list of cross-linguistic databases  by Bodo Winter list of helpful blog posts on freely accessibly cross-linguistic databases posts tagged "free PDF", because - you guessed it - they contain links to interesting publicly available research  posts tagged "Open Access", because obvious a post on the newly started Open Access publishing house, Endangered Languages Publishing Also; why not indulge yourself in some of the other resources SIL has produced and that are accessible freely? Such as: Online Dictionaries of the World - Webonary ,  Linguistics Glossaries ( English only  &  French...

More Ethnologue-facts, it seemed relevant. Ethnologue makes a distinction between languages spoken indigenously in a country and immigrant languages. They define immigrant languages in the following manner: Immigrant languages.  Immigrant languages are categorized as such if they are spoken by relatively recently arrived or transient populations which do not have a well-established, multi-generational community of language users in the country. Population estimates, if known, are shown in parentheses immediately following the language name. These languages do not have a separate language entry in the language listings for the country and are not included in the language counts for the country. Given the transitory nature of these populations and the difficulty in obtaining up-to-date information, this listing may be incomplete. Updated information on immigrant languages is welcomed. It is not clear to me that any other resource that exists or might come to exist on speaker...

As many of our readers know, the great catalogue of the worlds languages Ethnologue has instituted a paywall. In the wake of this, there's been a lot of discussion at various venues about what this means, about SIL International and languages codes in general. I've been following and participating in these discussions, and I thought I'd share some points that might clarify things a bit and improve discussions and general understanding of these issues. Please have a read through these points and the statements Ethnologue and SIL International has done themselves if you want to get into the discussions. Jump the basics if you know them. First some basics Ethnologue is a product from SIL International. It started in 1951 and is now on its 18th edition. A new edition will from now on be coming out every year in North American Spring , i.e. relatively soon. Ethnologue features information on languages, in particular population stats, alternative names, genealogies and enda...