Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Numeral systems are uniquely human achievements. They are essential for numerical cognition, present in almost every speech community around the world, invented to reflect and keep track of an important property of things in the world (their quantity) – and yet, there is striking diversity in structure, shape, and function of these systems. Describing and explaining this global diversity is a challenging task. We introduce Numeralbank: an extensible open-access database designed to facilitate the documentation, exploration, and analysis of the world's numeral systems. It provides a large-scale account of their general structural properties and how they relate to usage, communication, and cognition. Numeralbank includes standardized data on numeral systems in over 5,000 languages covering all continents, major language families, and cultural areas. In this talk, we comparatively describe the properties of numeral systems of the world, showing crucial information about the usage, communicative function, and cognitive underpinnings of numeral systems.