What question did this study set out to answer?

This tutorial aims to guide users in creating maps that visualize language distributions using QGIS.

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May 1, 2026Open Access

How To Visualize Language Polygons with QGIS (How to Do X in Linguistics 15)

Key Points

This tutorial aims to guide users in creating maps that visualize language distributions using QGIS.
Extracted Glottocodes from CLDF datasets
Utilized command-line tools for polygon data from Glottography datasets
Visualized data with QGIS and incorporated non-linguistic data like archaeological sites
Successfully demonstrated map-making with linguistic and additional data using QGIS
Provided a step-by-step approach to prepare and print maps using free software
Increased accessibility of map-making tools for linguists and researchers

Abstract

This tutorial shows how to build beautiful maps using polygon data of language distributions and the geospatial software QGIS. For this purpose, I show in the first part how to extract a list of Glottocodes from CLDF datasets and how to use command-line tools to extract the polygon data from Glottography datasets. The second part focuses on the visualization of the extracted data with QGIS. In this part, I also show to include non-linguistic data like archaeological sites and how to prepare the map for printing. The tutorial is fully implemented with free and open software and intends to make map-making accessible for linguists and other researchers.

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