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!
4 Responses to “World Atlas of Language Structures online”
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Awesome find, I’m gonna pass this resource onto all my linguistic colleagues out there. I’m sure they will appreciate it. I really like how they integrated Google Maps into this database.
Kambiz
P.S. I like your blog’s new theme a lot.
hi there,
i’m the programmer – and also admin – of wals online. so i’d recommend, you get in touch with me, instead of screen scraping, when you want the data. if you really want to do work on it, i guess the sqlite database would come in handy.
Thanks Kambiz!
Robert – I’ve just emailed you..
[...] Online (WALS) database release. Following suite was Mark from The Ideophone, and Simon from HENRY. All three are lingustic anthropology focused blogs that I follow and trust, and they all praised [...]