Humans Who Read Grammars

In 2015 I wrote a blogpost about Alberto Lucas López visualisations of the worlds languages.  I answered some frequently asked questions in relation to that visualisation, mostly to do with Ethnologue's definitions of languages, macro-languages and speakers. There's a lot more context needed to fully understand that infographic, and every time I see if re-shared I see the same questions pop up. It's a good infographic, so I understand that it goes viral - but when the same questions come every time it means that more context is needed.  Since then, Alberto (who is now Senior Graphics Editor at the National Geographic) has released an updated version, which among other things fixes the color of Mexico.  I haven't gone through to check what else has been adjusted, but many of the same questions will remain. This is because Ethnologue's classification of what is and what is not a language (which still underlies the visualisation) is still controversial at times a...

Hedvig has written o n how Ethnologue has become even more restricted than it already was , and what resources are out there that could be used instead. One of the things I miss from Ethnologue are its maps - although at least recently it was still possible to access most of these, by downloading them instead of viewing them on your browser. In her post, Hedvig points out that Langscape can be used instead, and that's all great. But what if you wanted to draw a map yourself? Especially one which you intend to publish? Some institutions may have access to the World Language Mapping System  (WLMS), which lies at the core of Ethnologue's (and Langscape's) maps, and was made by Global Mapping International ( which recently was closed, and now the WLMS is back formally with SIL ). I'm not sure about the details (and the user agreement parts of the WLMS website are down), but paying a lot of money for the WLMS must enable users to draw their own maps and publish them, as ...

I’m excited to give a guest blog post here at humans who read grammars on new methods in language geography.  I’m a geographer by trade, and I am currently a PhD student at the University of Maryland.  I also work for an environmental nonprofit - Conservation International - doing data science on agriculture and environmental change in East Africa.  Before ending up where I am now, I lived for some time in West Africa and the Philippines.  During my time in both of those linguistically-rich areas, I became quite interested in language geographies and linguistics more generally.  Spurned on by curiosity and my disappointment in available resources, I’ve done some side projects mapping languages and language groups, which I’ll talk about here. Problems with Current Language Maps A map of tonal languages from WALS.  Fascinating at a global scale, but unsatisfying if you zoom in to smaller regions. One major issue with most modern maps of languages is...

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...