Data sources & licences

This site is built entirely on open data and open-source software. Thank you to everyone who collected, shared and maintains it. Here is exactly what we use and the licence each part comes with.

Data version

Glottolog v5.3; 13 Glottography atlases; Unicode CLDR release-48; Wikidata retrieved 2026-10-13

Last refreshed

2026-10-13

Software

The map is drawn with MapLibre GL JS and PMTiles, and the site is built with Astro. These are open-source projects under their own licences.

Using our images and embeds

Images you download from the map and the embed code both carry the credits above. Please leave them in place.

Language areas: the atlases we use

Language areas come from Glottography, an open platform that digitises published language atlases (Ranacher et al., doi:10.5334/johd.459). Every release below is licensed CC BY 4.0, and the build stops if any release it reads is not. Where atlases overlap, each language takes its area from the first atlas in this list that covers it, so a language never appears twice. Please cite the original atlas as well as the Glottography release.

The list is in priority order: the specialist regional atlases first, then Asher and Moseley (2007), the world atlas, for everything else. A language that a specialist atlas covers uses that atlas’s area, and each area shows its atlas and year when you tap it on the map. Languages without any area are shown as points from Glottolog.

Atlases we left out

3 Glottography datasets have a non-commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence, which does not allow use on an advertising-supported site. They are not used: bowern2021australia, haynie2019modern, wurm1981pacific. Other datasets were left out because they show historical or reconstructed ranges, areas of language groups rather than languages, or are too old or too large to be the best source (13 datasets). That is why a language can be a point on this map even though a historical atlas covers it.

• allen2016resource: historical
• bouckaert2012indoeuropean: historical or reconstructed
• bowern2012pamanyungan: not language areas
• carling2025diacl: historical
• dedio2019britain: historical
• denevan1966aboriginal: historical
• eriksen2011nature: historical
• goddard1999native: historical
• grierson1903lsi: too old and too large
• rantanen2021uralic: historical
• suttles1985northwest: historical
• tarble1984nuevos: historical
• wikipedia2024officiallang: not a speech area

The Glottolog classification

Language names, codes, families, endangerment status and the positions of languages without an area come from Glottolog v5.3 (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18840967), licensed CC BY 4.0. We keep living spoken languages and drop extinct languages, sign languages, artificial languages and register entries. Please cite: Hammarström, Harald, Robert Forkel, Martin Haspelmath and Sebastian Bank, Glottolog, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, glottolog.org.

Country shares: Unicode CLDR

The percentage of each country’s people who speak a language, and each country’s population, come from the territory language data in the Unicode CLDR, release-48. Estimated speakers are the share times that population, so they are rough. The licence notice, reproduced as the Unicode licence asks:

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Speaker counts, native names and Wikipedia links: Wikidata

Wikidata is released under CC0 (public domain), so no credit is required, but we show where every figure came from. We queried 6,742 language codes on 2026-10-13. 1,593 languages have a speaker count, 975 a native name and 5,796 an English Wikipedia article. Speaker counts are approximate and differ hugely between sources; each is shown with the source and year that Wikidata gives.

Country outlines, towns and basemap

Country outlines are Natural Earth (admin-0 countries 10m, public domain). Town and city search uses GeoNames (cities15000, CC BY 4.0). The basemap is OpenStreetMap data (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL) served as Protomaps tiles.

How to read the map fairly

Language areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old. Areas overlap, cities are multilingual, and borders and names can be political. We show the data as the sources give it and cite the atlas for every area. If you think an area, a number or a name is wrong, the underlying atlas or the Glottolog record is the right place to correct it, and the correction will come through when we refresh the data. You can also tell us.