About Dialect Atlas
Every dialect carries a worldview. We're trying to keep them within reach.
Dialect Atlas is a place where the world's spoken varieties — the ones inside Persian, Arabic, Kurdish, Romanes, and beyond — are documented, learnable, and not flattened into a single standard form.
We build offline-first apps and reference material for languages whose dialects are too often treated as an afterthought. The atlas binds them together — by region, by country, by family — so the connections become visible.
The atlas, in numbers
- Languages
- 274
- Dialects
- 497
- Regions
- 11
- Countries
- 34
- Apps
- 5
Standard languages are useful. Dialects are alive.
When a language is taught only in its prestige form, the everyday voices speakers grew up with — the village vowels, the family vocabulary — slowly stop being passed on. Dialect Atlas treats those voices as primary, not secondary.
How Dialect Atlas works
Multi-dialect by design
Each app supports several dialects of its language. You pick yours; the content reflects it. There is no single 'correct' form.
Offline-first
Lessons, vocabulary, conversations — everything works without a connection. Designed for slow networks and old devices.
No fabrication
Where dialect coverage is uneven, we say so. We won't invent variants to make the data look symmetric.
Principles
Real data over fallback
Native voices and verifiable sources, not generic templates.
Honest about coverage
Some dialects are richer than others. The interface shows it plainly.
Community-sourced
Speakers, teachers and researchers contribute and review.
Culturally accurate
Imagery, scripts and examples grounded in the communities themselves.
Free and offline
No paywalls, no analytics surveillance, no required account.
Open where we can
Dialect references should be reusable beyond our apps.
More languages, more voices, more depth.
We're expanding the apps for Persian, Arabic, Kurdish and Romanes, and laying groundwork for new language families. Notes on what we're building and why live on the blog.
If your dialect is on this atlas — or should be — we'd like to hear from you.
Whether you can contribute audio, vocabulary, regional knowledge or critique, we welcome it. The atlas grows by being corrected.