Language Tapestries is a data visualization project that explores the health of language diversity among countries. With every language comes a particular way of thinking, perceiving, and expressing. Yet in the face of a few dominant languages, hundreds of these unique channels for inventing and understanding are disappearing.

Select a country from the dropdown menu below to explore the dataset. The bar charts depict the language profiles of each country, categorized into six levels of health ranging from extinct to what is coined "institutional," denoting official and cultural use. Each of the images to the right, conceptualized as a small swatch of woven cloth, represents this language profile using the same colour palette. - more - Every one of the “threads” composing this metaphorical weaving stands in for a language, its color corresponding to the health of that language on a six-point scale of black (extinct) through bright green (institutional). Since each swatch is kept the same size, the individual threads will be smaller in countries where many languages are spoken, and much larger in countries with less language diversity. The combined effect of colour tone and weaving density offers a snapshot view of the language landscape of a country.

My complete set of Language Tapestries comprises 234 individual weavings depicting the global language landscape in 2013. The data was assembled from the online resources of Ethnologue, based on field research compiled annually by SIL International. You can also view all tapestries on one page or see the colour chart for more detailed information about EGIDS language classification.

The World Language Explorer