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Project Members

  • Martin Haspelmath
  • Robert Forkel
  • Sebastian Bank

Cross-Linguistic Linked Data (CLLD)

The Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project was developing and curating interoperable data publication structures using Linked Data principles as integration mechanism for distributed resources. 

This philosophy allows for

  • small-scale efforts to publish individual databases like WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures) or WOLD (World Loanword Database), thereby preserving the brands established by these projects, 
  • while at the same time facilitating uniform access to the data across publications.

Within the project, this approach was applied to publishing lexical and grammatical databases already compiled at the MPI-EVA and elsewhere. This has led to a software framework which could then be used to develop database journals, i.e. edited collections of databases submitted by linguists from around the world.

The following databases either have current CLLD implementations or will at some point be available in the CLLD framework:

  • WALS Online (World Atlas of Language Structures), edited by Matthew Dryer & Martin Haspelmath 
  • WOLD (World Loanword Database), edited by Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor
  • APiCS Online (Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures), edited by Susanne Maria Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber
  • ValPaL (Valency Patterns Leipzig), edited by Iren Hartmann, Martin Haspelmath & Bradley Taylor
  • eWAVE (Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English), edited by Bernd Kortmann & Kerstin Lunkenheimer
  • IDS (Intercontinental Dictionary Series), edited by Bernard Comrie & Hans-Jörg Bibiko
  • ASJP Lexical Database,  edited by Søren Wichmann et al.
  • Numeral Systems of the World’s Languages, by Eugene Chan
  • Phoible (Phonetic Information Base and Lexicon), by Steven Moran

The following journals will soon be started for linguistic databases:

  • Journal of Cross-Linguistic Databases (JCLD), edited by Harald Hammarström
  • Dictionaria (Journal of dictionaries of less widely studied languages), edited by Martin Haspelmath & Iren Hartmann

For the purposes of linking linguistic data uniquely to languages, language codes were needed for each language and each variety. For this reason, the CLLD project also comprised:

  • Glottolog (catalog of all languages, families and dialects, with comprehensive reference information), edited by Harald Hammarström, Martin Haspelmath & Robert Forkel