Qwanqwa (qq): Language Metadata

A unified language metadata toolkit for NLP: identifiers, scripts, speakers, geographic data, and traversable relationships across ~27,312 languoids.

Name: Qwanqwa is a phonetic spelling of 'ቋንቋ', which means language in Amharic; qq is short to type.

[!NOTE] Explore in your browser: https://wesselpoelman.nl/qq/

Python package: https://pypi.org/project/qwanqwa/

Demo video: https://youtu.be/RMTqWq4YMZw

Paper (EMNLP 2026 System Demo): https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00620

Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21219618

Features

• Identifiers: BCP-47, ISO 639-1, ISO 639-3, ISO 639-2B, ISO 639-2T, ISO 639-5, Glottocode, Wikidata ID, Wikipedia ID, NLLB-style codes
• Geographic information: Countries and territories, which can be traversed from languoids and back
• Speaker information: Population counts, UNESCO endangerment status
• Writing systems: ISO 15924 codes and names, script types and families, native-script examples, canonical/historical metadata, and Unicode ranges
• Multilingual names: Language names in 500+ languages
• Relationships: Traversable graph of language families, scripts, and geographic regions
• Phylogenetic data: Language family trees from Glottolog
• External resources: Find datasets and reference resources that include a particular language. Currently includes CLLD datasets like WALS and Grambank, Hugging Face Datasets, and Universal Dependencies.

Languoids

In qq, language-like entities are referred to as Languoids: this includes dialects, macro-languages, and language families, not just individual languages. Not all languoids have coverage for all features.

Installation

uv add qwanqwa
# or
pip install qwanqwa

Quick Start

from qq import Database, IdType

# Load the pre-compiled database
db = Database.load()

# Get a language by BCP-47 code (default)
dutch = db.get("nl")
print(dutch.name)          # "Dutch"
print(dutch.iso_639_3)     # "nld"
print(dutch.speaker_count) # 24085200

# Also works with ISO 639-3, Glottocode, etc.
dutch2 = db.get("nld", id_type=IdType.ISO_639_3)
dutch3 = db.get("dutc1256", id_type=IdType.GLOTTOCODE)
dutch4 = db.guess("dut") # guessing works too
# This will all resolve to the same languoid
assert dutch == dutch2 == dutch3 == dutch4

# Search by name
results = db.search("Chinese")
for lang in results:
    print(f"{lang.name} ({lang.glottocode})")

# Search also accepts identifiers and ranks them higher
db.search("nl")[0].name   # "Dutch"
db.search("English")[0].bcp_47  # "en"

Important: qq makes a strict distinction between None (don't know) and False (it is not the case). When checking boolean attributes, prefer explicit checks over truthiness: use if script.is_canonical is None: rather than if not script.is_canonical:.

Traversal

Languoids, scripts, and geographic regions are all part of the same graph, which can be traversed:

dutch = db.get("nl")

# Language family navigation (Glottolog tree)
dutch.parent             # Global Dutch
dutch.parent.parent      # Modern Dutch
dutch.family_tree        # [Global Dutch, Modern Dutch, ..., West Germanic, Germanic, Indo-European]
dutch.siblings           # [Afrikaansic, Javindo, Petjo]
dutch.children           # [North Hollandish, Central Northern Dutch, ...]
dutch.descendants()      # All descendants (recursive)

# Writing systems
dutch.scripts            # [Script(Latin, code=Latn)]
dutch.script_codes       # ["Latn"]
dutch.canonical_scripts  # scripts marked canonical in LinguaMeta

# Geographic regions
dutch.regions            # [Aruba, Belgium, ..., Netherlands, Suriname, ...]
dutch.country_codes      # ["AW", "BE", "BQ", "CW", "NL", "SR", "SX"]

# Reverse traversal to script
latin = dutch.scripts[0]
latin.languoids          # All languages using Latin script

# Cross-domain queries
dutch.languoids_with_same_script   # other languages sharing any script
dutch.languoids_in_same_region     # other languages in the same regions

Identifiers and Conversion

from qq import IdType

# Automatic detection
lang = db.guess("nld")   # tries all identifier types

# Explicit conversion
db.convert("nl", IdType.BCP_47, IdType.ISO_639_3)    # "nld"
db.convert("nld", IdType.ISO_639_3, IdType.GLOTTOCODE) # "dutc1256"

# Conversion where you don't know or care what the source is, just the target.
# Useful for normalizing multiple standards to one
db.convert("nl", IdType.ISO_639_3)    # "nld"
db.convert("dutc1256", IdType.ISO_639_3) # "nld"
db.convert("mo", IdType.ISO_639_3)    # "ron" (deprecated alias normalized silently)

# Full BCP-47-like tags and NLLB-style language-script tags are accepted by
# guess() and convert(); script/region subtags are ignored for languoid lookup.
db.guess("nl-Latn-NL").name       # "Dutch"
db.convert("nl-Latn-NL", IdType.ISO_639_3)  # "nld"
db.convert("nld_Latn", IdType.BCP_47)       # "nl"

# If you want the language, script, and region components, use resolve_tag().
# Note that this only covers these three parts, not more specific region codes.
tag = db.resolve_tag("nl-Latn-NL")
tag.languoid.name        # "Dutch"
tag.script.iso_15924     # "Latn"
tag.region.country_code  # "NL"

# NLLB-style codes
dutch.nllb_codes()              # ["nld_Latn"]
dutch.nllb_codes(use_bcp_47=True) # ["nl_Latn"]

get() and guess() warn when you use a deprecated code that still resolves to a replacement. convert() does not; it silently normalizes deprecated aliases to the requested target identifier.

Multilingual Names

# Name of Dutch in French
dutch.name_in("fr")    # "néerlandais"
dutch.name_in(french)  # also accepts a Languoid object

# Native name
dutch.endonym  # "Nederlands"

Command Line Interface

# Look up a language
qq get nl
qq get nld --type ISO_639_3

# Search by name or identifier
qq search Dutch
qq search nl

# Database statistics and validation
qq validate

# Rebuild the database from sources
qq rebuild

# Check source status
qq status

# Update sources (only needed if you want to rebuild the database,
# not necessary in normal use)
qq update

# For publishing the web-based explorer
qq export-demo
qq publish-demo <output-path>
qq prepare-release

Examples

See the examples/ directory for runnable scripts covering:

• 01_basic_usage.py: Loading and accessing attributes
• 02_identifiers.py: Working with identifier types and retired codes
• 03_conversion.py: Converting between identifiers
• 04_traversal.py: Language family navigation
• 05_search.py: Searching and filtering
• 06_names.py: Multilingual name data
• 07_geographic.py: Geographic regions and countries
• 08_relations.py: Relationship graph traversal
• 09_advanced_queries.py: Complex queries and statistics
• 10_linking_datasets.py: Joining datasets that use different identifier systems
• 11_normalizing_datasets.py: Normalizing mixed identifier codes to a single standard

Case studies

The browser explorer supports metadata inspection and graph traversal. Language pages link to datasets containing that language.

The case-studies/ directory contains runnable analyses that use qq:

• huggingface-audit/: Scans 119,583 HuggingFace datasets with language tags and classifies 8,237 unique language: tags as valid, deprecated, a misused country code, or unknown. qq resolves 8,144 tags (98.9%) and normalizes coverage for 7,943 languoids.
• linking-datasets/: Links five lexical datasets (Concepticon, WordNet, Etymon, Phonotacticon, NoRaRe) that use different identifier standards. qq resolves all NoRaRe language codes and finds 34 languages covered by all five datasets.
• latex-tables/: Generates a LaTeX table of language metadata (identifiers, scripts, speaker counts, families) for an imaginary 30-language NLP benchmark.
• identifier-coverage/: Visualizes which combinations of identifier standards (Glottocode, ISO 639-3, ISO 639-1, Wikidata) cover which languoids as an UpSet plot.

Sources

This project builds on the work of many people. See docs/sources.md for the full source list, licenses, and terms.

Development

To rebuild the database from sources, install with the build extras:

uv add qwanqwa[build]
# or
pip install qwanqwa[build]

To install for local development:

git clone https://github.com/WPoelman/qwanqwa
cd qwanqwa
uv sync --group dev

License

The data sources qq incorporates have different licenses, see here.

We follow this example and license the software as Apache 2.0 and the data as CC BY-SA 4.0.

This means for instance that any data issues we encounter will be openly reported to the upstream sources (in accordance with ShareAlike principles of CC BY-SA), but that the software will ship with a compiled dataset (in accordance with the redistribution CC BY and CC BY-SA allow).

Ideally we'd use CC BY-SA for everything, but this is highly discouraged for software, even by Creative Commons themselves.