Glottolog data is organized as a tree, mostly conveying a genealogical classification of its nodes - called languoids.
Glottolog distinguishes three kinds (or levels) of languoids,
- families: non-leave nodes from the root up to language level.
- languages: either leaf nodes or nodes separating a family and one or more dialect nodes.
- dialects: nodes between language level up-to leafs.
Each path from the root to a leaf must contain exactly one language-level languoid.
These levels are defined in languoid_levels.ini.
While Glottolog aims to be a complete catalog of spoken L1 languages, it also contains information about other kinds of languages. To make this information uniformly accessible, we organize it like the data about "regular" languages in (non-genealogical) trees called pseudo families.
These pseudo families (or non-genealogical trees) are described on the
Glottolog website and
defined in language_types.ini (marked with a non-empty pseudo_family_id).
A macroarea is an area of the globe of roughly continent size.
The division of the inhabited landmass into the macroareas defined here is optimal in the following sense. It is the division
- into 6 areas,
- for which there are at least 250 languages in each area, such that
- the distance between the component parts inside each area is minimized, and
- the length of intersections between pairs of macro-areas is minimized.
See Harald Hammarström and Mark Donohue 2014.
The Glottolog macroareas are defined in macroareas.ini. Polygons with the macroarea boundaries serialized as GeoJSON are available from macroareas/voronoi.
Glottolog's references can be described by assigning document types. The list of document types is defined in document_types.ini.
MED (Most Extensive Description) types partition the list of document types into a set of classes suitable to assess the descriptive status of a language.
MED types are defined in med_types.ini
The Agglomerated Endangerment Status measures how endangered a language is according to one of the sources defined in aes_sources.ini. The list of states is defined in aes_status.ini.