About the Atlas of Languages
What it is
An interactive atlas, made in Brazil, of the world’s most spoken languages. It started as a Portuguese recreation of the WordTips infographic The 100 Most Spoken Languages in the World (2020) and grew: it now covers 201 languages, two chart shapes (radial tree and fishbone), search by country, a short history of each of the 100 original languages, and the phrase “Hello, good morning. Are you well?” written and spoken in every language.
Where the data comes from
- Languages 1–100: total and native speaker figures transcribed from the WordTips infographic, which cites Ethnologue as its source. They are a 2020 snapshot, deliberately preserved.
- Languages 101–201: the public Ethnologue 200 list (2026 edition), with rounded totals and no native-speaker counts. Families, branches and countries for these entries were assigned by the atlas.
- Families and branches: a simplified didactic classification inspired by Glottolog. Distances in the chart do not represent time or degree of similarity.
- Histories: summaries written from general sources (Glottolog, Ethnologue, encyclopaedias); dates are approximate. Portuguese only for now.
- Phrases: translations made for the atlas. Those marked “approximate” have not yet been reviewed by native speakers — corrections are welcome.
- Audio: 122 files generated with Azure AI Speech neural voices and 40 with the open Meta MMS model. See the full list.
How it was built
The site is a static page — HTML, CSS and JavaScript — with D3.js charts, hosted on Hostinger in a Brazilian data centre. There is no database or application server. The interface is available in Portuguese, English and Spanish; histories and notes are in Portuguese for now. Code and data were produced with the help of artificial intelligence (Claude, by Anthropic) and human review.
Who maintains it
A personal project by Junior Ribeiro. Suggestions, translation fixes and new sources can be sent through the channels listed in the privacy policy.
Credits and licences
Original infographic: WordTips. Data: Ethnologue (SIL International). Reference classification: Glottolog. Visualisation library: D3.js (ISC). Voices: Azure AI Speech (Microsoft) and Massively Multilingual Speech (Meta, CC-BY-NC). The atlas texts and compilation may be reused with attribution (CC BY 4.0).