Glottography Workshop 3.3.2026, Ranacher
Human Diversity, School of Languages and Translation Studies University of Turku, Finland
Title: Glottography: Mapping the World’s Languages
Humans speak, sign, and write in more than 7,000 languages. Some span entire continents, while others are spoken in areas no larger than a single village. Glottography is the first open-data initiative for mapping the spatial distribution of the world’s languages. It represents speaker areas as georeferenced spatial polygons, enriched with relevant metadata. Specifically, Glottocodes link each polygon to a unique identifier in Glottolog, a database cataloguing the world’s dialects, languages, and language families. In this talk, I first introduce the status quo of language mapping before Glottography, highlighting the need for an independent and open approach. I describe Glottography’s design philosophy and explain how it accounts for language areas as socially constructed spaces rather than crisp spatial objects. I then present Glottography’s current coverage and compare it to existing proprietary platforms. Finally, I discuss potential avenues for using Glottography data in computational analyses to explore the origins, distribution, and drivers of global linguistic diversity.
In a follow-up hands-on workshop, I introduce the Rglottography package in R, demonstrating how to create clear, publication-ready language maps and perform basic statistical analyses on Glottography data.
