Data Sources & Licenses
I built this on top of several open linguistic datasets. Every analysis you run surfaces data from one or more of them. Their authors did the work; this page names them and their licenses so attribution travels with the data.
| Source | License | What I use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Wiktionary | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Etymology text, definitions, pronunciations, related words |
| Glottolog | CC BY 4.0 | Language families, tree structure, coordinates (~8,500 languoids) |
| Lexibank | CC BY 4.0 (per dataset) | Expert-annotated cognate sets (4,981 sets, 25,741 members). Cards on the etymology page mark Lexibank-sourced entries with a ★ badge. |
| IE-CoR | CC BY 4.0 | Indo-European Cognate Relationships: 25,731 lexemes across 160 languages with LIV²/NIL references. Distributed via Lexibank. |
| WOLD | CC BY 4.0 | World Loanword Database: documented borrowings with source language and confidence. Powers the loanword badges (➜ glyph) and the "borrowed from X" pills on headwords and cognates. Haspelmath, Martin & Tadmor, Uri (eds.) 2009. WOLD. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. |
| ASJP | CC BY 4.0 | Automated Similarity Judgment Program: 40 Swadesh-list concepts surveyed across 11,540 languages. Powers the "attested in N languages worldwide" coverage stat. Wichmann, Søren, Eric W. Holman & Cecil H. Brown (eds.) 2022. The ASJP Database (version 20). |
| CLICS³ | CC BY 4.0 | Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications: which concepts share a single word across language families. Powers the "in other languages this word also means..." section. Rzymski, Tresoldi et al. 2020. The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications, reproducible analysis of cross-linguistic polysemies. |
| PHOIBLE | CC BY-SA 3.0 | Phoneme inventories (via the sister /api/linguistic/ endpoints) |
| WALS | CC BY 4.0 | Typological features (via /api/linguistic/) |
| ISO 639-3 | Open (SIL attribution) | Canonical three-letter language codes |
| COCA | Licensed (paid) | Modern American English word frequency, 1990–2019. Licensed from Mark Davies / english-corpora.org; redistribution restricted, summary statistics surfaced here. |
| Wikimedia Commons | Varies (mostly CC BY-SA) | Illustrative images and pronunciation recordings; each image caption and audio credit links back to the file page with its specific license |
| Google Books Ngrams | CC BY 3.0 | Word frequency per decade, 1500s–2010s (English corpus, version 3), accessed via ngrams.dev. Powers the usage sparkline. |
| kaikki.org (wiktextract) | CC BY-SA (from Wiktionary) | Machine-readable pronunciation data (IPA and audio recording links). Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, LREC 2022, pp. 1317–1325. |
| Natural Earth | Public domain | Simplified 1:110m coastlines behind the journey map in the mobile app, via world-atlas. |
A note on share-alike
Wiktionary and PHOIBLE are share-alike licenses: anything I ship that meaningfully incorporates them inherits the same license terms. That means the etymology graphs and data tables you see here are re-distributable under CC BY-SA: take them, build on them, credit the source.
Something missing?
If I surfaced data from a source not named here, or if an attribution needs fixing, let me know. Reach out to luke@lukesteuber.com or open an issue on the code at github.com/lukeslp/diachronica.