Intercontinental Dictionary Series (IDS)
The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (IDS), a long-term cooperative project, involves linguists all over the world, and aims at preserving information on little-known languages. To this end, a database will be established, where lexical material across the continents is organized in such a way that comparisons can be made. Historical studies, comparative, and theoretical linguistic research can then be based on this documentation. [more]
Infrastructure for Wordlists
Wordlists are used in various projects at our institute. This project provides the infrastructure for the organization, storage, and retrieval of all these wordlists. [more]
Computational and quantitative methods in historical linguistics
Applying computational and statistical methods to large lexical and typological dataset and supplementing empirical data with computer simulations we try to address questions like: How fast do different elements of language change? How can we classify all of the world's languages consistently? How did the present distribution of languages come about? [more]
Re-evaluation of the Witotoan/Boran family/ies
In this project we examine the relationship between the Boran languages (Bora and Muinane) and the Witotoan languages (Witoto proper, Ocaina, Nonuya) spoken in the Northwest Amazon. [more]
Language Contact in Sri Lanka
This project investigates the interaction between the languages of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has, among all linguistic areas, the decisive advantage of being rather small with regard to the languages concerned (half a dozen or less) and being geographically clearly defined, viz.. by the Indian Ocean. [more]
The Kalahari Basin area: a 'Sprachbund' on the verge of extinction
The KBA project attempts to untangle some aspects of the complex linguistic and population history of the southern African groups speaking languages other than from the Bantu family. These are commonly subsumed under the unsubstantiated concept of a “Khoisan” family but might turn out to share certain traits because of convergence processes within a geographical area. The project will pursue a two-tiered approach, investigating southern Africa as a linguistic area from a broad perspective as well as offering fine-scaled studies of individual contact situations. The overall approach is a multidisciplinary one in involving linguists, molecular anthropologists and social anthropologists. [more]
Inheritance and contact in a language complex: the case of Taa varieties (Tuu family)
Taa, the only surviving member of the Tuu family (formerly "Southern Khoisan") with a substantial number of speakers, is a large cluster of dialects spoken by small bands of former hunter-gatherers (commonly referred to as "San") and stretching geographically from east-central Namibia from the Nossob River over the former Aminuis reserve into the Ghanzi and Kgalagadi Districts of Botswana up to a line Okwa-Tsetseng-Dutlwe-Werda. Mutual intelligibility usually exists between neighboring varieties, but differences between geographically remote dialects can amount to a linguistic distance found between languages. However, the dialectal diversity of Taa is still hardly documented. [more]
|
