Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Mapping the World's Languages


The Langscape Map is a map of the world's languages. You can click anywhere on the map to discover the languages spoken at that location.

The map includes 6,400 of the world’s languages. As well as helping you discover which languages are spoken where, the map includes information about demographics, language families and audio recordings & text materials. After clicking on a location on the map you can select one of the listed languages to view more information about it beneath the map.


The Endangered Languages Project by the Alliance of Linguistic Diversity is looking to foster an exchange of information about languages which are threatened with extinction.

There are currently around 7,000 languages surviving in the world but it is estimated that at least half of them will disappear entirely before the end of this century. The Endangered Languages Project uses Google Maps to show the locations where languages are at risk throughout the world.

If you click on a language listed on the map you can get further details about the language, including YouTube samples of the language being spoken, references to the language in texts from Google Books and details about how many of each language's speakers survive and an assessment of the language's current vitality.


Type any word in any language into Wordmap and you can listen to it being translated into every other language in the world.

After you type a word into Wordmap a Google Map is slowly populated with all of the word's translations. As the translated word is added to each country around the world you can also hear the translated word being pronounced in each language.

After the map has finished adding all the translated words to the map, lines are added to the map to connect all the countries with a common language. You can also click on each word on the map to learn a little more about the country's language from the language's Wikipedia entry.

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