An interactive journey backward through the recorded history of human language.

• Explore words from yesterday to the earliest marks on clay.
• Discover the history of over 7,000 languages and 140 language families.
• Understand the timeline of writing, spanning over 5,200 years.
• Features entries on reconstructed ancestors, sign languages, and invented languages.
• Includes detailed explanations of dating conventions (e.g., 'c.' for circa, 'Attested by').
• Visualizes the history of language on a proportional timeline, highlighting the vastness of spoken language compared to written records.
• Provides insights into the earliest known written languages like Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian.
• Discusses the origins of language deep in the Stone Age, predating writing by tens of thousands of years.
• Offers filters for regions, families, statuses, and writing systems, plus an A-Z index.
• The dataset is available for reuse as JSON.