Glottolog
node · earth
The open bibliographic and genealogical catalogue of the world's languages, edited by Harald Hammarström, Robert Forkel, Martin Haspelmath and colleagues and hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Its distinguishing commitment is conservatism about relatedness: Glottolog recognises a family only where the classification is supported in the published comparative literature, declines to accept proposed macro-families that lack that support, and treats every isolate as a top-level family in its own right. The consequence is that Glottolog reports substantially more top-level families than catalogues that group aggressively, and the difference between two published family counts is usually a difference of policy rather than of fact. Each language and family entry is tied to the bibliography that supports it, which is the feature that makes the catalogue usable as evidence rather than merely as a list: a reader can see what a classification rests on. It is the reason a question like "how many language families are there?" has no single answer, and the reason it is a better question than it looks.
A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.
Read in · 1
Evidence · 1
Timeline
No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.
Connections · 2
- The language isolateassesses
- SIL International (Ethnologue)comparable_to
Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 10 related
- Story
- The open bibliographic and genealogical catalogue of the world's languages, edited by Harald Hammarström, Robert Forkel, Martin Haspelmath and colleagues and hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Its distinguishing commitment is conservatism about relatedness: Glottolog recognises a family only where the classification is supported in the published comparative literature, declines to accept proposed macro-families that lack that support, and treats every isolate as a top-level family in its own right. The consequence is that Glottolog reports substantially more top-level families than catalogues that group aggressively, and the difference between two published family counts is usually a difference of policy rather than of fact. Each language and family entry is tied to the bibliography that supports it, which is the feature that makes the catalogue usable as evidence rather than merely as a list: a reader can see what a classification rests on. It is the reason a question like "how many language families are there?" has no single answer, and the reason it is a better question than it looks.
- Knowledge
- The language isolate
- SIL International (Ethnologue)
- Glottolog
- Connections
- The language isolate
- SIL International (Ethnologue)
- Language death
- Basque (Euskara)
- Sumerian
- Glottolog
- Sumerian ceases to be a mother tongue
- UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, third edition
- Language death
- Glottolog
- The first edition of Ethnologue
- Evidence
- Supports the description of a conservative, bibliography-linked classification policy that treats isolates as top-level families, and thereby the point that published family counts differ by policy. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. glottolog.org returned EGRESS_BLOCKED in this session, so no version, family count or language count is quoted anywhere in this pack, and the editorial and institutional attribution is given from standing knowledge.
Observed changes · 0
No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.
Actions
/atlas?object=ORG_GLOTTOLOG&experience=ORG_GLOTTOLOG