PUFF PUFF Project

What’s WALS?

The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors
(many of them the leading authorities on the subject)

* Dataset referred to May 2011, acquired from wals.info

Languages in the WORLD

2.678 living languages in the world placed in their birthplace

Linguistics definitions taken from OxfordDictionaries.com

linguistical hierarchy


Language The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.	Genus A class of things which have common characteristics. Sometimes more genera are grouped in subfamily.	Family All the descendants of a common ancestor. A race or group of peoples from a common stock.

* DataSet referred to 2013, acquired from ethnologue.com

most spoken families

10 language families,
spoken by at least 1% of world population

Indo-European
Sino-Tibetan
Niger-Congo
Afro-Asiatic
Austronesian
Dravidian
Altaic
Japonic
Tai-Kadai
Austro-Asiatic

number of speakers

86% of world population speaks one of the 1.322
languages belonging to the 10 most spoken families

10 most spoken languages

shown by million speakers per language

What’s WOLD?

The World Loanword Database provides vocabularies of 41 languages
from around the world, with comprehensive information about the loanword status of each word.
It allows users to find loanwords, source words and donor languages in each of the 41 languages,
but also makes it easy to compare loanwords across languages.

* Linguistics definitions taken fromOxfordDictionaries.com

loanword system