Typology
Languages differ along many axes at once. Three ways to see that: the shape of their sound inventories, the typological features they pattern together on, and the distribution of living vs. extinct languages across families.
Phonology — inventory complexity
PHOIBLE counts every distinctive sound a language uses. Some languages have under thirty; some have over six hundred. Here are the most phonemically rich languages on record.
| Language | Family | Total | C | V | T |
|---|
Inventory for one language
Pick an ISO 639-3 code and see every phoneme PHOIBLE has recorded for it, grouped by segment class.
WALS — typological features
The World Atlas of Language Structures tracks 192 features: word order, case systems, tone, voicing, inflection. Below are the parameters with the widest language coverage, and a side-by-side comparison of two large families.
| ID | Parameter | Languages | Distinct values |
|---|
Family comparison
| Parameter | Family A | Family B |
|---|
Language types — living vs. extinct by family
ISO 639-3 flags each language as living (L), extinct (E), historical (H), ancient (A), constructed (C), or special (S). How that distributes across the world's biggest language families says a lot about which families are still in daily use.
| Family | Total | Living | Extinct | Historical | Ancient |
|---|