HENRY

In a wonderful move, the Max Planck Institute and Michael Cysouw have placed their World Atlas of Language Structures online. WALS, for those who don’t know, is a large database of structural information about languages (e.g. phonological, grammatical, lexical).

Here’s the page of info for Maori, and, to choose a feature at random, here’s a map of languages using “clicks”.

All the information is available under a Creative Commons license (awesome), and the website looks very well designed and laid out logically (*cough* and parsable *cough*). I’ve been playing around with analyses on this database for about four years now, and am just finishing a paper on it, so there’s huge potential for all sorts of fun work here. I’ll have to work out how to suck some of this information into my projects when I get some time!