Glottoviz

Filter languoids

Hover a country to outline it on the map.

Press B for a box, P for a polygon.

Hides country borders and bounding boxes on the map.

KelpFusion parameters

Density t (hull→tree)

Max fill size (% extent)

Node radius (% extent)

Edge width (% extent)

Short-edge bias (% extent)

Nesting shrink

Smoothing passes

Fill opacity

About Glottoviz

Purpose

Glottoviz visualizes the world’s languages by combining their geographic distribution with the language-family hierarchy on an interactive map, letting you see where language groups are located and how they relate genealogically at the same time.

The tabs

Visualization 1: A general tidy-tree view of the language hierarchy (synthetic dataset).
Visualization 2: A rudimentary set visualization using containment plus a Minimum Spanning Tree to connect points within a set. The convex hull can be toggled. Same synthetic data as Visualization 1.
Visualization 3: A simple rendering of one of the datasets from the KelpFusion paper. Each colour is a set. Concentric "donuts" mark a point belonging to multiple sets.
Visualization 4: KelpFusion implemented as close as possible to the paper's pseudocode. On the NYC dataset it comes close to (but not identical to) the paper's figures. Edge routing around other nodes is imperfect but deemed close enough for practical use on Glottolog data. Selectable datasets: the KelpFusion NYC sample, the synthetic tree (Visualization 1/2), and three hand-picked real Glottolog regions (Europe, New Guinea, West Africa). Parameters are tunable in the panel but applied on demand — a rebuild is expensive, so slider changes are deferred until you press R to recompute. The right-hand legend lists one card per set (a mini-drawing, languoid counts and family); a set can be hidden, and R recomputes the layout with the hidden sets excluded.
Visualization 5: A simple alternative Glottolog browser: one dot per languoid. Filter by level (family/language/dialect), category (spoken L1 / dialect / family / …, defaulting to the genuine ones), top-level family, Most Extensive Description (MED), endangerment (AES) and geography (draw a bounding box with B or a polygon lasso with P). Hovering a dot shows the languoid's name. You can also run KelpFusion over the current filter: R (or the Run KelpFusion button) computes/recomputes the set shapes, and K shows or hides the overlay without recomputing. Known limitation: languoids with identical coordinates stack and are not individually distinguishable in this version.

Data sources & licenses

Glottolog 5.3 — languoid points, families, levels, categories, MED and endangerment (AES); powers Visualization 5 and Visualization 4’s regional samples. Licensed CC-BY-4.0.
Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian. 2026. Glottolog 5.3. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at glottolog.org)

KelpFusion technique & NYC sample — Visualization 3, and Visualization 4’s “nyc” source.
Meulemans, W., Henry Riche, N., Speckmann, B., Alper, B., & Dwyer, T. (2013). KelpFusion: A Hybrid Set Visualization Technique. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 19(11), 1846–1858. doi:10.1109/TVCG.2013.76

Synthetic dataset — Visualization 1, Visualization 2 and Visualization 4’s “synthetic” source. Generated for this project; no third-party attribution required.

Basemap — © OpenStreetMap contributors (map data under ODbL); rendered with Leaflet. (Also shown in the map’s bottom-right corner.)

Glottography language-area polygon datasets — imported for the planned polygon feature. Each is derived from an original source and carries its own license:

Dataset	Original source	License
allen2016resource	M.W. Allen, R.L. Bettinger, B.F. Codding, T.L. Jones, A.W. Schwitalla, Resource scarcity drives lethal aggression among prehistoric hunter-gatherers in central California, PNAS 113(43) 12120–12125 (2016). doi	CC-BY-4.0
asher2007world	Asher, R. E. & Christopher J. Moseley (eds.) 2007. Atlas of the World’s Languages. 2nd edn. Routledge.	CC-BY-4.0
bouckaert2012indoeuropean	Bouckaert, R., Lemey, P., Dunn, M., Greenhill, S. J., Alekseyenko, A. V., Drummond, A. J., Gray, R. D., Suchard, M. A. & Atkinson, Q. D. 2012. Mapping the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family. Science 337(6097). 957–960.	CC-BY-4.0
bowern2012pamanyungan	Bowern, Claire & Quentin Atkinson. 2012. Computational phylogenetics and the internal structure of Pama-Nyungan. Language 88. 817–845. doi	CC-BY-4.0
bowern2021australia	Bowern, C. (2021). Files for Australian Language Locations [Data set]. Zenodo. doi	CC-BY-NC-4.0
carling2025diacl	Carling, Gerd & Jost Gippert (eds.) 2025. DiACL/TITUS Polygon Archive. Frankfurt am Main: Goethe University. link	CC-BY-4.0
dedio2019britain	Dedio, Stefan, Peter Ranacher & Paul Widmer. 2019. Evidence for Britain and Ireland as a Linguistic Area. Language 95(3). 498–522. doi	CC-BY-4.0
denevan1966aboriginal	Denevan, William M. 1966. The aboriginal cultural geography of the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia. (Ibero-Americana, 48.) Berkeley: University of California Press.	CC-BY-4.0
edwards2020metathesis	Edwards, Owen D. 2020. Metathesis and unmetathesis in Amarasi. Berlin: Language Science Press. doi	CC-BY-4.0
eriksen2011nature	Eriksen, Love. 2011. Nature and Culture in Prehistoric Amazonia: Using G.I.S. to reconstruct ancient ethnogenetic processes from archaeology, linguistics, geography, and ethnohistory.	CC-BY-4.0
figueira1982atlastotalargentina	Figueira, Ricardo. 1982. Atlas total de la República Argentina. In Chiozza, Elena (ed.) Centro Editor de América Latina.	CC-BY-4.0
goddard1999native	Goddard, Ives. 1999. Native Languages and Language Families of North America. (Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians.) Smithsonian Institution / University of Nebraska Press.	CC-BY-4.0
grierson1903lsi	Linguistic Survey of India, compiled and edited by George Abraham Grierson. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903–1928.	CC-BY-4.0
haynie2019modern	Haynie, Hannah J. & Michael C. Gavin. 2019. Modern language range mapping for the study of language diversity. doi	CC-BY-NC-4.0
hochstetler2004sociolinguistic	Hochstetler, J. Lee, Jude A. Durieux & Evelin I. K. Durieux-Boon. 2004. Sociolinguistic survey of the Dogon language area. SIL International.	CC-BY-4.0
matsumae2021exploring	Matsumae, H., Ranacher, P., Savage, P. E., Blasi, D. E., Currie, T. E., Koganebuchi, K., Nishida, N., Sato, T., Tanabe, H., Tajima, A., Brown, S., Stoneking, M., Shimizu, K. K., Oota, H. & Bickel, B. 2021. Exploring correlations in genetic and cultural variation across language families in northeast Asia. Science Advances 7(34). eabd9223. doi	CC-BY-4.0
messineo2011aproximacion	Messineo, Cristina. 2011. Aproximación tipológica a las lenguas indígenas del Gran Chaco… Indiana. 183–225.	CC-BY-4.0
ministerio2009pueblos	Ministerio de Educación, Ciencia y Tecnología de la Nación & Programa Nacional Mapa Educativo (eds.) 2009. República Argentina – Pueblos Indígenas.	CC-BY-4.0
queixalos2000linguas	Queixalos, Francisco & Odile Renault-Lescure (eds.) 2000. As línguas amazônicas hoje. São Paulo: IRD/Instituto Socioambiental/MPEG.	CC-BY-4.0
rantanen2021uralic	Rantanen, T., Vesakoski, O., Ylikoski, J. & Tolvanen, H. (2021). Geographical database of the Uralic languages (v1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. doi	CC-BY-4.0
schapper2020papuan	Schapper, Antoinette. 2020. Introduction to The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar, vol. 3. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. doi	CC-BY-4.0
steever2019dravidian	Steever, S. B. 2019. The Dravidian Languages. (Routledge Language Family Series.) Taylor & Francis.	CC-BY-4.0
suttles1985northwest	Suttles, Wayne & Cameron Suttles. 1985. Native languages of the northwest coast. The Press of the Oregon Historical Society.	CC-BY-4.0
tarble1984nuevos	Scaramelli, Kay Tarble de & A. Zucchi. 1984. Nuevos datos sobre la arqueología tardía del Orinoco: la serie Valloide. Acta Científica Venezolana 35. 434–445.	CC-BY-4.0
vuillermet2012grammar	Vuillermet, Marine. 2012. A Grammar of Ese Ejja, a Takanan language of the Bolivian Amazon. Université Lumière Lyon 2 dissertation.	CC-BY-4.0
walker2011bayesian	Walker, Robert S. & Lincoln A. Ribeiro. 2011. Bayesian phylogeography of the Arawak expansion in lowland South America. Proc. R. Soc. B 278(1718). 2562–2567. doi	CC-BY-4.0
wikipedia2024officiallang	Wikipedia contributors. 2024. List of official languages by country and territory — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. (accessed 18 November 2024).	CC-BY-4.0
wurm1981pacific	Wurm, S. & Hattori, S. 1981/1983. Language Atlas of the Pacific Area, vols. 66–67, Pacific Linguistics Series C. Canberra: ANU. Scans & GIS released by the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI).	CC-BY-NC-4.0
zucchi2017arqueologia	Zucchi, Alberta. 2017. Arqueología de los llanos occidentales y el Orinoco. Caracas: Centro Nacional de Estudios Históricos.	CC-BY-4.0

Each Glottography dataset is a CLDF dataset from the Glottography project (github.com/Glottography), published in the Zenodo Glottography community (zenodo.org/communities/glottography), where the full license text and per-release DOIs for each dataset are available.

Planned features

KelpFusion on the whole dataset / connected to Visualization 5
Additional basemaps
Extra geographic layers (rivers, biomes, topography)
Polygons (not only dots) from Glottography
Different visual idioms for different zoom levels / point densities
Selection functionality, letting users export a list of languoids

Built with

Leaflet, Leaflet-Geoman, D3, Turf.js, Bootstrap, Django.