Our projects
Alongside the papers, LINGACON builds places where the measurement can be used: by statistical offices and organizations that need a standard, and by individuals curious about their own place on the world's language map.
Linguistic Planet™
Most of what LINGACON publishes is written for institutions. Linguistic Planet is the other side of the project: the same research, opened up for anyone who has ever wondered where they stand on the world's language map.
It is being built around a few features:
- Measure your own linguistic connectivity. Enter the languages you speak and see what share of humanity you can understand: your personal GLCI, computed on the same data as the global index.
- Get a Linguistic Passport. A document of your own linguistic profile: your repertoire, what it opens, how far in the world it reaches, and where it stops.
- Explore ALPS everywhere. Every country and territory and every continent, ranked and mapped, including named country groups from the EU to the G20.
- Understand connectivity itself. Why some large languages rarely cross a border, how diversity and connectivity relate, and what a single additional language does to the whole network.
Linguistic Planet is planned at linguisticplanet.com, together with an API for partners: programmatic access to indices and country data for organizations that want to build on them.
L-MAS: the measurement standard
L-MAS, the LINGACON Multilingualism Assessment Standard, is the instrument the rest of the work rests on. It defines what counts as speaking a language, how to ask, and how to turn the answers into a comparable number. Five levels scale with the resources available: a single question added to a survey already in the field, a four-question module, a full battery, a national audit, or a repeating tracker that follows a population over time. Whichever level is used, the output is the same metric, ALPS, so results remain comparable across countries and across years.
The standard is free and open. Statistical offices, ministries, universities and companies are welcome to adopt it without asking permission; the site describes the five levels and gives the Level 1 question in full.
Assessments of a company, city, region or country can also be requested there. An L-MAS assessment reports ALPS and connectivity for the population measured.
How the three fit together
lingacon.com
The research itself: papers, methodology, data, and the scientific foundation the standard rests on. This site.
linguisticplanet.com
The same research made explorable for everyone, plus the partner API. In development.
l-mas.com
The measurement standard and the assessment services built on it, for organizations, cities and governments.