Interactive Map of World’s Languages

from Atlas of the World’s Languages

This visualization explores the distribution of world’s languages based on the Asher & Moseley (2007) Atlas of the World’s Languages. This visualization builds on the recent work of Ranacher et al. (2025), who created a global and interoperable dataset of linguistic distributions derived from the Atlas of the World’s Languages. Each polygon represents a geographic area where a specific language is spoken. Two maps are shown for each language: one for the traditional speaker areas and one for the contemporary speaker areas.

Important! The resolution of the map is reduced to 10% of the original data via ms_simplify function to reduce the size of the rendered HTML page. If you need higher resolution, you can remove the ms_simplify line in the prepare_geojson_data function and render the qmd file locally.

Main Interactive Maps

Traditional Speaker Areas

Contemporary Speaker Areas

Major Language Families

Below are interactive maps for major language families in the traditional and contemporary data. Each family shows traditional (left) and contemporary (right) maps side-by-side. Hover over any polygon to see detailed language information.

Atlantic-Congo

Traditional Speaker Areas

Contemporary Speaker Areas

Austronesian

Traditional Speaker Areas

Contemporary Speaker Areas

Sino-Tibetan

Traditional Speaker Areas

Contemporary Speaker Areas

Nuclear Trans New Guinea

Traditional Speaker Areas

Contemporary Speaker Areas

Afro-Asiatic

Traditional Speaker Areas

Contemporary Speaker Areas

Indo-European

Traditional Speaker Areas

Contemporary Speaker Areas

Austroasiatic

Traditional Speaker Areas

Contemporary Speaker Areas

Uralic

Traditional Speaker Areas

Contemporary Speaker Areas

Complete Language Database

Traditional Database

Contemporary Database

Language Family Statistics

Technical Implementation

This visualization uses: - SF: For spatial data handling - Leaflet: For interactive mapping - Plotly: For interactive visualizations - DT: For interactive data tables - Quarto: For modern scientific publishing

The application is designed for an initial check of the language maps from the Atlas of the World’s Languages. It is deployable on GitHub Pages using Quarto. The script is in the language-map.qmd file (partly generated by Cursor). The reformated geojson data are contemporary_sf.rds and traditional_sf.rds.

Data Sources:

  • Asher, R.E. & Moseley, C. (2007). Atlas of the World’s Languages. Routledge.

  • Ranacher, P., Forkel, R., Efrat-Kowalsky, N. et al. (2025). A global and interoperable dataset of linguistic distributions derived from the Atlas of the World’s Languages. Scientific Data 12, 1466. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05828-6