The Typological Database System (TDS)

Some of the categories of variables catalogued by TDS.

The Typological Database System (TDS) is a really sweet resource for typological data, and it would be silly not to mention it early on in this blog. It's basically a meta-database, combining and cross-indexing information from 14 existing typological databases, and covering a total of 1,166 languages (though not all information is available for all languages). Its sources include the Anaphora Typology Database, the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database, the World Color Survey, the Person Agreement Database, the Graz Database on Reduplication, and many others, giving a good mix of phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic phenomena. On the right you can see a screenshot showing some of the topics covered. The web-based interface is particularly nice, and friendly for getting your hands on the raw data. My only beef is that it doesn't work with Chrome. 

Speaker populations update: 6,305 languages

As a follow-up to my earlier posting... I've scraped the population figures for every language that has them available in Ethnologue. That turns out to be 6,305 languages, and the result is here. If you sum up the all the populations, it comes to a total of 6,211,860,710 speakers (keeping in mind that many people speak more than one language; and of course that the figures are all very rough).

I also parsed out the years that Ethnologue attaches to the population numbers, and those are included. They update a lot of their population numbers whenever they release a new edition of Ethnologue, so most of them come from the 1990s and 2000s, but one could conceivably still learn something by comparing decades. E.g., do populations from the 1990s tend to be larger than populations from the 2000s?

Also, it seems that earlier editions of Ethnologue remain archived on their site, so one could possibly track population change within individual languages that way. Unfortunately, once you go about two editions back, things start to get messy because they hadn't yet settled on the ISO 639-3 standard for language identifiers.

Population sizes and phonological inventory sizes

Just came across a paper by Vladimir Percliev, of the Department of Mathematical Linguistics (sweet!) at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Title: "There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language." PDF here. In it he offers evidence against claims by Trudgill that large speaker communities favor languages with medium-sized phonological segment inventories, while small communities favor either small or large segment inventories. Percliev takes population figures from Ethnologue and cross-indexes them with the languages in UPSID (the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database); he doesn't see evidence of he claimed correlation.

So anyway, I'm not the first to scrape population figures from Ethnologue :)

Hat tip to Morgan.

Speaker populations

Ethnologue is a great resource, being a catalogue of almost 7,000 of the world's known languages. An entry contains such information about a language as: the regions where it is spoken, its genetic classification, known dialects, and the approximate number of people who speak it. Lately I've been thinking that this last quantity might be an interesting covariate to consider when looking at typological distributions, so I hacked a python script to scrape it off of the Ethnologue site. Given the three-letter ISO 639-3 identifier of a language, it attempts to retrieve the Ethnologue entry for that language, and extract the population figure.