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.