An Interactive Map of the World’s Languages

Abstract

This project thesis presents the development of an interactive language map that visualizes the global distribution of spoken languages. The system integrates linguistic data from Wikidata and geospatial data from OpenStreetMap to allow users to search for languages and view where they are spoken. The application was built with a React and TypeScript frontend, a NestJS backend, and a MongoDB database hosted in the MongoDB Atlas cloud. SPARQL queries were used to extract structured language data, which was cleaned and stored to enable fast queries. The resulting product enables interactive visualization of language regions with support for filtering by country or region, viewing speaker statistics, and language family information. The map also supports interactive exploration by clicking on a country to display information about the languages spoken in that country. The project demonstrates how open data sources can be used to create educational visualizations, although the quality and coverge of the external databases constrain the final accuracy.