The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database or ABVD is a large database of basic vocabulary lists that mainly covers the Austronesian languages. It also has a comprehensive inventory of basic vocabulary lists for

Kra–Dai languages The Kra–Dai languages (also known as Tai–Kadai and Daic) are a language family in Mainland Southeast Asia, Southern China and Northeast India. All languages in the family are tonal languages, including Thai and Lao, the national languages o ...

Hmong–Mien languages The Hmong–Mien languages (also known as Miao–Yao and rarely as Yangtzean) are a highly tonal language family of southern China and northern Southeast Asia. They are spoken in mountainous areas of southern China, including Guizhou, Hunan, Yunn ...

Japonic languages Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan, sometimes also Japanic, is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and ...

, and other

languages of East Asia The languages of East Asia belong to several distinct language families, with many common features attributed to interaction. In the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, Chinese varieties and languages of southeast Asia share many areal feature ...

. It is currently the largest lexical database of Austronesian languages in terms of the number of languages covered.

History

The database was created by Simon J. Greenhill as part of a graduate research project that he was working on with

Russell Gray Russell David Gray is a New Zealand evolutionary biologist and psychologist working on applying quantitative methods to the study of cultural evolution and human prehistory. In 2020, he became a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evoluti ...

. Each vocabulary list in the database has 210 basic words. The list was originally from a set of printed 200-item word lists developed by

Robert Blust Robert A. Blust (; ; May 9, 1940 – January 5, 2022) was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Blus ...

as a lexicostatistical aid for classifying the Austronesian languages. 10 more numerals were added after the original 200th item, 'four', giving the word list its present 210-item inventory. In 2008, a computational analysis of the lexical database showed that the Austronesian languages had originated from Taiwan, rather than from Indonesia or other regions of Oceania.Pacific people spread from Taiwan, language evolution, study shows
ScienceDaily. The database was originally hosted by the

University of Auckland , mottoeng = By natural ability and hard work , established = 1883; years ago , endowment = NZD $293 million (31 December 2021) , budget = NZD $1.281 billion (31 December 2021) , chancellor = Cecilia Tarrant , vice_chancellor = Dawn F ...

, and is currently hosted by the

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (german: Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte) performs basic research into archaeological science. The institute is one of 80+ research institutes of the Max Planck Society an ...

. It operates under the

CC BY 4.0 A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

license.

References

External links

*{{official website, https://abvd.eva.mpg.de/austronesian/
Projects by Simon Greenhill
Word lists Linguistics websites Linguistics databases Lexical databases Creative Commons-licensed websites Creative Commons-licensed databases