The register of languages · Glottolog, carried whole
Every language.
On the record.
This page carries the Glottolog register — 8,618 languages, every one with its glottocode, its ISO 639-3 code where it has one, the full chain of families over it, its macroarea, its countries, and its endangerment status on the six-step AES scale. Search it by name or code, walk any family as a drawn tree, or read the whole register off a world map inked by endangerment.
No key, no account, and — unusually for this site — no wire at all: the register ships inside the page, generated once from Glottolog’s published 5.3 release, and nothing is fetched while you read. What Glottolog does not state, this page does not invent.
8,618 languages · 238 families and 183 isolates · 6 macroareas · Glottolog 5.3 · nothing fetched at runtime
The register
Name it, or code it.
Type a name, an ISO 639-3 code, or a glottocode. The card gives the language its full account: the chain of families over it — each link a live door into the tree — and its endangerment status with the scale named, not just a colour.
The register
reading the register…
The tree
A family, branch by branch.
Every family in the register, ranked by how many languages it holds — from Atlantic-Congo’s 1,408 down to the 183 isolates, each a family of exactly one. Pick one and walk it: the plates are drawn from the classification chains themselves, and every plate is stamped with an honest count.
Family tree
The map
The world, inked by endangerment.
8,304 dots — every language the register places, at the register’s own coordinates, coloured by its AES status. The family chosen in the tree sits proud; everything else sits back. Click a dot and the register opens that language’s card.
World map
The ring is the language on the card.
The daily ten
Ten languages. Where are they spoken?
Every day the register deals the same ten languages to everyone who opens this page — a seeded shuffle, the seed being the day’s number since 1 January 2026. The clue is the card: name, family chain, endangerment status. You name the macroarea on the easy tier or the country on the hard tier; the reveal drops the dot where Glottolog places it. Copy the score and the link replays your deal for a friend.
The daily ten
dealing…
Waiting for the register…
Only spoken first languages with coordinates, countries and a single macroarea in the register qualify — bookkeeping, unattested, sign, pidgin and mixed entries never do. Country names are ISO 3166-1 short names, as the register’s own codes intend. Your progress for each day and tier is kept in this browser and nowhere else.
About
A register, not an estimate.
The data is Glottolog — Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian, Glottolog 5.3, Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology — carried here under its CC-BY 4.0 license, from the CLDF release published 2 March 2026. This page was generated from that release once, at build time; it fetches nothing while you read it, and it says nothing the release does not say.
“Language” here means what Glottolog means by it: a language-level languoid in its tree. Dialects (13,706 of them in the same release) and families (4,853 nodes, from Atlantic-Congo down to the smallest subgroup) are counted separately and are not rows in this register — the families appear only as the chain drawn over each language, and the dialects not at all. That is why the number here is 8,618 and not the “7,000” of common summary: where a line between language and dialect is disputed, this page simply takes Glottolog’s line, and Glottolog also keeps sign languages (227), pidgins, unattested and unclassifiable entries, and a “Bookkeeping” shelf of 380 spurious-but-once-claimed entries — each labelled as exactly what it is on its card.
The endangerment chip is Glottolog’s AES — the Agglomerated Endangerment Status, six steps: not endangered, threatened, shifting, moribund, nearly extinct, extinct. The register’s limits are stated rather than papered over: 376 languages carry no AES status and say so; 314 carry no coordinates and are therefore absent from the map; 183 isolates have no family chain because an isolate is its own family of one. Your chosen family is remembered in this browser and nowhere else.
The daily ten is a game on the same table and nothing more: the deal is
a seeded shuffle of the register’s qualifying rows, so it is the same
for everyone on a given day and replays from its ?d= link — and
it changes with the register, since a regenerated table is a new floor
for the shuffle. Nothing is scored anywhere but in your browser.