Glottolog

Glottolog was first developed and maintained at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. Its main curators include Harald Hammarström and Martin Haspelmath.

Overview

Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström established the Glottolog/Langdoc project in 2011. The creation of Glottolog was partly motivated by the lack of a comprehensive language bibliography, especially in Ethnologue.

Glottolog provides a catalogue of the world's languages and language families and a bibliography on individual languages. It differs from Ethnologue in several respects:

• It includes only those languages that the editors have been able to confirm both exist and are distinct. Varieties that have not been confirmed, but are inherited from another source, are tagged as "spurious" or "unattested".
• It attempts only to classify languages into families demonstrated to be valid groupings based on research by linguists specializing in them.
• Comprehensive bibliographic information is provided, especially for lesser-known or underdescribed languages.
• To a limited extent, alternative names are listed according to the sources that use them.
• Apart from a single point-location on a map at its geographic centre, no ethnographic or demographic information is provided.

Language names used in the bibliographic entries are identified by ISO 639-3 code or Glottolog's own code (Glottocode). External links are provided to ISO, Ethnologue and other online language databases

The latest version is 5.3, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License in March 2026.

It is part of the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.