To fill out the colour codes for a specific language:

• look up a language's vitality rating on these three websites:
  • UNESCO;
  • Endangered Languages;
  • Glottolog
    
• look up ratings given by each database and match them in the table below to find out to what colour codes they correspond;
• fill out the vitality table on the language's fact sheet with the three colour codes.
  The colour codes can be inserted using the Media Manager (the -button in the toolbar when editing a page). Once in the Media manager, the colour codes are located in the folder “endangerment”.

* Note:
Before, the Language Vitality Table listed the scores of UNESCO,Endangered Languages and Ethnologue. Since 2019, Ethnologue has their language vitality ratings behind a paywall. For this reason, the Agglomerated Endangerment Status (AES) of Glottolog has been added in stead. The Agglomerated Endangerment Status (AES) combines the scores of UNESCO, Ethnologue and Endangered Languages.

The colour codes correspond with descriptions of language vitality given by four websites: the website of Unesco's Atlas for languages in danger, the online Ethnologue, the Endangered Languages website, and Glottolog.
Each website uses its own, unrelated, system to rate a language's vitality, using terms such as “vulnerable”, “endangered”, “critically endangered”, etc. Mercator's wiki chooses to represent these vitality descriptions with colour codes, so that the viewer can quickly get an idea of the language's vitality.