Google Launches Language Explorer, an Interactive Map of About 7,000 Languages

At a glance

Google Research has launched Language Explorer, an interactive platform for exploring the distribution, writing systems, and number of speakers of languages around the world. It covers about 7,000 languages and 159 writing systems, and holds information useful for language research and language technology development. It was also featured as an installation at a museum exhibition in Berlin.

Key points

1. 1

   Users can search by language name, region, continent, number of speakers, or whether the language is endangered, and can open a detail page for each language from the map.

2. 2

   The information comes from LinguaMeta, an open-source repository that gathers 19 sources, and every entry carries a source citation.

3. 3

   Only about 100 languages are widely supported by language technologies such as machine translation, so this information helps set priorities.

4. 4

   The amount of information varies by language. Speaker numbers are available for 83% of languages, but self-names are recorded for only 15%.

Why it matters

Thousands of languages exist, yet technical support reaches only a small fraction of them. The map gives a quick overview of the state of world languages and helps show which ones should be studied first.

Also reported by

• Google Research blogExploring the world's languages with Language Explorer