About the project
Languages of the World is a map that shows, for every country, its official, co-official, regional, minority and simply widely used languages – with the share of the population that uses them, the regions where a language has a special position, and its language family. The site covers 437 languages in 234 countries and territories.
Where the data comes from
| Source | What we use | Licence |
|---|---|---|
Unicode CLDR 49 – supplementalData.xml | the languages of each country with the estimated share of the population and official status (territoryInfo), country populations, language scripts (languageData), ISO 639 code mappings | Unicode License v3 – free use, including commercial, provided the copyright notice is kept |
| Glottolog 5.3 (CLDF release) | language family membership and the subgroup tree, from which we picked branches (Slavic, Romance, Bantu…) | CC BY 4.0 – Hammarström, Forkel, Haspelmath, Bank: Glottolog, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
| ICU (PHP intl extension) | English and Polish names of languages and scripts, and the names of languages in themselves (endonyms) | Unicode licence (CLDR data) |
| Natural Earth | country and regional boundaries on the maps | public domain |
This is the basis of the first version of the data. We manually corrected statuses that CLDR simplifies or that are out of date (e.g. the official languages of South Africa, Mali, Rwanda and North Macedonia, Russian in Ukraine, French in the Maghreb), added the regions where languages are official or predominant (Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, India, Italy, Finland, the UK, Russia, China, South Africa, Ethiopia, Nigeria and others), and added “hello” and “thank you” for more than 130 languages. All corrections are kept in JSON files in the repository.
How to read the numbers
- Share of the population is the CLDR estimate of how much of a country’s population uses a language – as a first or a second language. That is why the shares in one country often add up to more than 100%.
- Number of speakers is the sum of these estimates over all countries (population × share). It includes second-language users, so for English, French or Swahili it is much larger than the number of native speakers. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not an exact value.
- Family follows Glottolog, which does not accept uncertain macro-families: instead of Niger-Congo it has separate Atlantic-Congo and Mande families, instead of Nilo-Saharan – Nilotic and others. Glottolog counts creoles in the family of the language that supplied most of their vocabulary.
Statuses
- official
- the only official language of the whole country (by law, or – marked “de facto” – in practice),
- co-official
- one of several official languages of the whole country,
- regional
- official in part of the country or legally protected as a regional or minority language,
- widely used
- no status, but known by at least 10% of the population (often as a second language),
- minority
- no status and used by less than 10% of the population – minorities, immigrants.
On the “language families” map a country takes the colour of the family of its main official language (the one with the largest share); a switch lets you use the most widely spoken language instead. “Number of official languages” counts only languages official in the whole country, not regional ones.
Privacy
The site uses no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. Visit statistics are collected by Matomo in cookieless mode, with IP addresses shortened before they are stored – they cannot identify an individual and need no consent.
One exception: if you choose the light or dark theme yourself (the switch in the header), your browser remembers that choice in its local storage (localStorage). It stays on your device and is never sent to us; in automatic mode nothing is stored.
Contact form
- Contact form. When you write to us (contact page), we process your name or nickname, e-mail address and message, as well as the name of the site and the page from which the message was sent. The message is delivered by e-mail to contact@ominuvo.com.
- Purpose and legal basis: replying to your message – based on the consent you give in the form (art. 6(1)(a) GDPR); protecting the form against spam and abuse – based on the controller’s legitimate interest (art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Providing the data is voluntary, but without it we cannot reply.
- Spam protection: we store the sender’s IP address only as a hash (the address cannot be recovered from it) for the message limit, and delete it after an hour. The form uses no cookies.
- Recipients and retention: the data is stored by our hosting and e-mail provider, which processes it only on our behalf; we do not sell it or share it with anyone else. We keep the correspondence for as long as needed to reply and then for no longer than 12 months, unless longer retention is required by law or for the defence of legal claims.
- Withdrawing consent: at any time, by writing to contact@ominuvo.com. Withdrawing consent does not affect the lawfulness of processing before the withdrawal. You also have the right to data portability.
The data controller is the owner of the Ominuvo service (contact: contact@ominuvo.com). You have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict and port your data, to object, and to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority – in Poland the President of the Personal Data Protection Office (UODO).
Related maps
The site is part of the Ominuvo series of maps. Fonts: Literata and IBM Plex Sans (SIL Open Font License); share images also use Noto Sans (OFL).