Library Guides: Linguistics: Data, Corpora, and Tools

Endangered Languages

Unesco Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
Interactive atlas of extinct and endangered languages. Search by name, location, number of speakers, or degree of endangerment or browse using the interactive map feature.
World Oral Literature Project
Database of language endangerment levels with references to collections and recordings of oral literature from archives around the world.

Language and Location: A Map Annotation Project (LL-Map)
Digital mapping project that integrates language data and information from the physical and social sciences. Users can browse over 700 maps, or create and share their own.
MLA Language Map
Uses data from the US Census 2000 to display the locations and numbers of speakers of thirty languages and three groups of less commonly spoken languages in the United States.
World Atlas of Language Structures
Large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials such as reference grammars.
The Atlas of the World's Languages
MU Ellis Reference, G1046.E3 A8 1994. Divided into geographic regions containing blocks of maps, linguistic history of each region, genetic relations among languages, their linguistic structure, statistical and sociolinguistics information, and bibliographies of further resources.
The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change: A Multimedia Reference Tool
MU Ellis Large Room 202; CD-ROM available at Reference Workstation. Provides a comprehensive view of vocalic pronunciation and phonology across North America.

Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)
A worldwide virtual library of language resources containing over 100,000 records, covering resources in half of the world's living languages.
Bringham Young University Corpora
Free online searching of seven large corpora from four languages.
Max Planck Institute for Linguistics: Data & Corpora
Provides browsable corpora, including documentation of endangered languages, data from deaf signers, and more.
TalkBank
Collection of corpora, including transcripts of child language, dementia, aphasia, and second language acquisition.

WordNet
Lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. WordNet is a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Speech Accent Archive
Presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed.
Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
152 transcripts of academic speech events recorded at the University of Michigan.

English Lexicon Project
Provides access to a large set of lexical characteristics, along with behavioral data from visual lexical decision and naming studies of 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords.
Corpus of Historical American English
Allows you to search more than 400 million words of text of American English from 1810 to 2009. You can see how words, phrases and grammatical constructions have increased or decreased in frequency, how words have changed meaning over time, and how stylistic changes have taken place in the language.
Corpus of Contemporary American English
Contains more than 425 million words of text and is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts.
British National Corpus
100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written.
American English Dialect Recordings
Contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches.

Linguistics Computing Resources on the Internet: A topically organized list of resources on the Internet that pertain to linguistics computing.

Using computers in linguistics : a practical guide, edited by John M. Lawler and Helen Aristar Dry. MU Ellis Library, P98 .U767 1998

Many Eyes: World Language Speakers by Family
Visualization software that allows users to compare the number of speakers of 408 languages.

Google Books Ngram Viewer
Search 500 billion words of text to see changes in the frequency of words and phrases in books.
LINGUIST List Guide to Software
Guide to software used in various subdisciplines of linguistics.
Linguistics Computing Resources on the Internet
A topically organized list of resources on the Internet that pertain to linguistics computing.
Natural Language Software Registry
A guide to much of the natural language processing (NLP) software available, including information on how to acquire access.