Find a language by sound, script, family, or region
A world atlas where every language is colored in by the region where it's actually spoken, not just by country.
Languages (3659 of 3659)
The map shows where every language is spoken natively. Pick filters in the sidebar — language family, script, tone, click consonants, vowel inventory, word order, gender — and the map shrinks to the languages that match.
Most language directories are alphabetical. This one isn't. The point is to find languages by what they're like, not what they happen to be called. Ask for tonal languages without grammatical gender, non-Indo-European languages with case marking, or African languages without clicks, and the map shows what fits.
Each pin opens a card with speaker counts, geographic spread, scripts in use, and a similarity score against the languages you already speak. The same data feeds the rest of the site, so anything you find here links straight to its grammar walkthrough, builder, or comparison page.
Questions people ask
- What can I filter by?
- Language family, script type, phonology (tone, click consonants, ejectives, vowel inventory), syntax (word order, case, gender, alignment), morphological complexity, and region. Filters stack — you can ask for tonal languages of West Africa with no gender marking and the map will show you the matches.
- Where does the data come from?
- Polygons come from the Asher and Moseley Atlas of the World's Languages and from Glottolog. Typological features come from the URIEL+ database, with curated overrides for the languages we cover in depth. Speaker numbers come from Ethnologue.
- Why isn't every language here?
- Polygon coverage follows the Asher Atlas and Glottolog. Some languages — minority languages of Europe, smaller creoles, recently constructed languages — aren't in the source atlases. They appear in the catalog and grammar pages but not on the map. We add manual regions when source data is missing something important.