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Participants

  • Sebastian Nordhoff
  • Harald Hammarström
  • Martin Haspelmath
  • Robert Forkel

Glottolog

The first aim of this project was to provide an exhaustive list of bibliographical references of descriptive work in linguistics ('Langdoc'). For understudied languages, we aimed at having references to everything available on earth, while for better-studied languages, only the most extensive works were included. A web inteface allows browsing this reference catalogue by language families, areas, document types, or bibliographical data. 

The second aim ('Glottolog') was to base definitions of  'languoids' (languages, dialects, and language families) on empirical grounds: a languoid was defined as the sum of the documents which describe it. A number of impasses in discussions in linguistics, most notably the language/dialect distinction, become moot when using definitions based on collections of documents.

Glottolog is part of the CLLD project.