A Curated Language Database

This tool draws from a curated database of 216 world languages. Each entry carries its English name, native autonym rendered in its own script, language family classification, and locale code. When you switch dice83 to a different interface language, the display names update accordingly: visit /ja/language and every language name appears in Japanese, /ko/language for Korean, /de/language for German. The native autonym always stays in its original script.

Language Families

Linguists group the world's languages into families based on shared ancestry. Indo-European, the largest family, stretches from Icelandic to Bengali, from Portuguese to Punjabi. Afro-Asiatic spans Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Hausa across North Africa and West Asia. Sino-Tibetan encompasses Mandarin, Cantonese, Burmese, and Tibetan. Niger-Congo covers most of sub-Saharan Africa with extraordinary diversity. The Families counter in the statistics panel tracks how many distinct linguistic lineages you encounter. Over many picks, the distribution reveals which families hold the most documented languages.

Autonyms and Exonyms

An autonym is the name a language uses for itself. Japanese calls itself 日本語. Arabic is العربية. Hindi is हिन्दी. Georgian is ქართული. These self-referential names often reveal etymological roots invisible in translation. The card on this page displays both: the autonym in its native script and the translated name in your display language. When both names happen to match (as when viewing English in an English interface), the card shows the name once.

Scripts and Writing Systems

The native names in this database employ dozens of distinct writing systems. Latin script covers most European and many Southeast Asian languages. Arabic script flows right to left across North Africa and West Asia. Devanagari renders Hindi, Sanskrit, and Marathi. Hangul, invented by King Sejong in 1443, encodes Korean. Georgian, Ethiopic, Tamil, Thai, Armenian, Khmer, and Tibetan each have their own unique scripts. The spin animation cycles through these scripts in rapid succession, creating a visual tour of the world's writing systems.

In the Classroom

Language discovery pairs naturally with geography. Have students press Space and locate each language on a world map. Which continents appear most? Which language families dominate? Challenge the class to collectively fill the Discovery Board below. The coupon collector mathematics predict this requires roughly 1286 picks on average to see every language at least once. Actual results vary, opening a conversation about expected value and individual experience.

Private by Architecture

The language database ships with this page. Your device selects each language using hardware-seeded randomness from crypto.getRandomValues(). No pick data leaves your device. Share the URL and your friend draws their own independent results from their own device.