The Linguasphere Observatory (or the Observatoire, based on its original French and legal title: Observatoire Linguistique) is a non-profit transnational research network, devoted (alongside related programs) to the gathering, study, classification, editing and free distribution online of the updatable text (initially in English) of a fully indexed and comprehensive Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities.
Since 2010, the deputy director and webmaster of the Observatoire has been Pierrick le Feuvre, with the chairman of its research council being Roland Breton, emeritus professor at the University of Paris VIII.
From 2001 until December 2005, the Linguasphere Observatory was actively involved in collaboration with the British Standards Institution BSI Group and with ISO/TC 37in the design and development of a four-letter (alpha-4) code covering—potentially—every recorded language variety in the world.
The division of the languages of a zone into sets, chains and nets is based on relative degrees of linguistic proximity, as measured in principle by approximate proportions of shared basic vocabulary.
For example, A practical application of the Linguasphere Register and its linguascale in the study of a complex urban linguistic environment has been as the referential framework for successive surveys of over 200 languages other than English spoken by plurilingual children at state schools in London (representing just under 40% of the total number of children attending), as edited in 2000 by Baker and Eversley and in 2010 by Eversley et al.[3] In Paris, from 1987, the Observatoire linguistique created a bilingual exhibition Langues de la Liberté / Languages of Liberty, tracing the transnational development of certain basic concepts of personal freedom through the interaction of English and French, rather than by the action of any one nation.
It was inaugurated in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou on 6 June 1989, and presented there throughout the summer of 1989 as the official Canadian contribution to the bicentenary celebrations of the French Revolution.
At the subsequent presentation of this bilingual exhibition at the Hôtel de Région in Rouen (Haute-Normandie), from 23 September to 21 October 1989, the Observatoire linguistique organised the first public display of the only surviving contemporary copy of the vernacular (and arguably pre-Latin) text of England's Magna Carta, written in 13th century French.
Thanks to continued support from Canada, the exhibition was subsequently presented by the Observatoire in Belgium and England, at the Palais des Congrès in Liège and at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1990, and finally in Australia, at Old Parliament House, Canberra in May 1991.
In the context of the need to design a plurilingual framework of ethics for a future planetary society, the Observatoire has announced its intention to return to the transnational theme of Magna Carta in 2015, on the occasion of the 8th centenary of the signing of its formal Latin version at Runnymede in 2020.