pyglottolog

Programmatic access to Glottolog data.

Note

Accessing Glottolog data programmatically has become a lot easier with the Glottolog CLDF dataset. Thus, pyglottolog now mostly serves as internal data curation tool.

Install

To install pyglottolog you need a python installation on your system, running python >3.8. Run

pip install pyglottolog

This will also install the command line interface glottolog.

Note: To make use of pyglottolog you also need a local copy of the Glottolog data. This can be

• a clone of the glottolog/glottolog repository or your fork of it,
• an unzipped released version of Glottolog from GitHub,
• or an unzipped download of a released version of Glottolog from ZENODO.

Make sure you remember where this local copy of the data is located - you may have to pass this location as option when using pyglottolog.

A convenient way to clone the data repository, keep it updated and access it from pyglottolog is provided by cldfbench. See the README for details.

Python API

Using pyglottolog, Glottolog data can be accessed programmatically from within python programs. All functionality is mediated through an instance of pyglottolog.Glottolog, e.g.

>>> from pyglottolog import Glottolog
>>> glottolog = Glottolog('.')
>>> print(glottolog)
<Glottolog repos v0.2-259-g27ac0ef at /.../glottolog>

For details, refer to the API documentation at readthedocs.

Command line interface

Command line functionality is implemented via sub-commands of glottolog. The list of available sub-commands can be inspected running

$ glottolog -h
usage: glottolog [-h] [--log-level LOG_LEVEL] [--repos REPOS]
                 [--repos-version REPOS_VERSION]
                 COMMAND ...

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --log-level LOG_LEVEL
                        log level [ERROR|WARN|INFO|DEBUG] (default: 20)
  --repos REPOS         clone of glottolog/glottolog
  --repos-version REPOS_VERSION
                        version of repository data. Requires a git clone!
                        (default: None)

available commands:
  Run "COMAMND -h" to get help for a specific command.

  COMMAND
    create              Create a new languoid directory for a languoid
                        specified by name and level.
    edit                Open a languoid's INI file in a text editor.
    htmlmap             Create an HTML/Javascript map (using leaflet) of
                        Glottolog languoids.
    iso2codes           Map ISO codes to the list of all Glottolog languages
                        and dialects subsumed "under" it.
    langdatastats       List all metadata fields used in languoid INI files
                        and their frequency.
    langsearch          Search Glottolog languoids.
    languoids           Write languoids data to csv files
    refsearch           Search Glottolog references
    searchindex         Index
    show                Display details of a Glottolog object.
    tree                Print the classification tree starting at a specific
                        languoid.

Extracting languoid data

Glottolog data is often integrated with other data or incorporated as reference data in tools, e.g. as LanguageTable in a CLDF dataset.

To do this, the LanguageTable from glottolog/glottolog-cldf could be copied, or one may use glottolog's languoids subcommand, which dumps basic languoid data into a CSVW file with accompanying metadata:

glottolog languoids [--output=OUTDIR] [--version=VERSION]

This will create a CSVW package, i.e.

• a CSV table glottolog-languoids-VERSION.csv
• and a JSON description glottolog-languoids-VERSION.csv-metadata.json

where VERSION is the result of running git describe on the data repository, or the version string passed as--version=VERSION in case you are running the command on an export of the repository or a download from ZENODO.

Languoid search

To allow convenient search across all languoid info files, pyglottolog comes with functionality to create and search a Whoosh index. To do so, run

glottolog searchindex

This will take a couple of minutes (~15 on a somewhat beefy laptop with SSD) and build an index of about 800 MB size at build/.

Now you can search the index, e.g. using alternative names as query:

$ glottolog langsearch "Abipónok"
1 matches
Abipon [abip1241] language
languoids/tree/guai1249/guai1250/abip1241/md.ini
Abipónok [hu]

1 matches

But you can also exploit the schema defined in pyglottolog.fts.get_langs_index; i.e. use fields in your query:

$ glottolog langsearch "country:PG"
...

Alamblak [alam1246] language
languoids/tree/sepi1257/sepi1258/east2496/alam1246/md.ini
Papua New Guinea (PG)

906 matches

$ glottolog --repos=. langsearch "iso:mal"
...

Malayalam [mala1464] language
languoids/tree/drav1251/sout3133/sout3138/tami1291/tami1292/tami1293/tami1294/tami1297/tami1298/mala1541/mala1464/md.ini

1 matches

Reference search

The same can be done for reference data: To create a Whoosh index with all reference data, run

glottolog searchindex

Now you can query the index (using the fields described in the schema):

$ glottolog refsearch "author:Haspelmath AND title:Atlas"
...
(13 matches)