Music theory terminology in 100 languages

What this is

Most music-theory vocabulary exists online in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. For the other ninety or so languages, a learner asking what a minor third is called in their own language usually finds nothing. This is the terminology layer of Anotona released as open data: 602 concepts in 100 languages, 10 families, 24 writing systems, 60,200 rows — and for every row the public URL of the page the term appears on. The dataset is not a claim about terminology; it is an index into pages anyone can open and check.

What was measured

All thirteen interval concepts were mapped by hand to their English Wikipedia articles and compared with the titles of every other language edition (1,300 pairs). In 1,076 cases (82.8 percent) that language edition has no article for the concept at all. Of the 224 pairs that can be compared, 175 (78.1 percent) use the same word or a spelling variant of it. The disagreements cluster on two concepts where Wikipedia carries the acoustic term (semitone, unisono) and this dataset the interval name (minor second, perfect unison). Both are correct; they belong to different registers.

The finding: the Italian vocabulary travels, the structural vocabulary does not

Comparing each English term with its counterpart in the 61 Latin-script languages shows a clear pattern: performance directions are adopted, while the words for how music is built and counted are formed anew. Adopted everywhere (1.00): tritone, tremolo, a tempo, accelerando, adagio. Localised everywhere (0.00): pickup measure, tuplets, 3/4 time, 4/4 time, 6/8 time.

The measure is deliberately conservative: it counts containment, close similarity and word stems, but does not, for example, treat “chord” and “Akkord” as related. It understates relatedness rather than inventing it. Pitch names and chord symbols are stripped before comparing, and degree progressions (I–iii–IV–V) are excluded.

How the terms were made

They were composed in an assisted editorial process: a language model drafted them under written rules, rule-based checks and per-family self-tests ran against every field, and the result was published as the live site. They are not the work of professional translators, and no native speaker has reviewed every language. That is the honest limitation of this release, and the reason the Wikipedia comparison is part of it rather than an afterthought. If a term in your language is wrong, the row names the page to correct, and a message to info@anotona.com is read.

Data, licence, citation

All files are openly available at Zenodo under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: the dataset as CSV and JSONL, the 1,300 comparison pairs, the computed findings and the documentation.

Download the dataset · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23173566

Goldberg, Leonard (2026). Music Theory Terminology in 100 Languages: 60,200 Terms with Verifiable Sources. Anotona. Dataset. CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23173566

The pages the dataset comes from

• Intervals — thirteen distances, with notation, keyboard and sound
• Scales — every scale in every key
• Chord progressions — the degree progressions, to listen to
• Music dictionary — tempo, dynamics, articulation