PHOIBLE is a

linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

accessible through its

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

and compiling

phonological Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

inventories from

primary documents In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under ...

and tertiary databases into a single, easily searchable sample. The 2019 version 2.0 includes 3,020 inventories containing 3,183 segment types found in 2,186 distinct languages. It is edited by Steven Moran, Assistant Professor from the Institute of Biology at the

University of Neuchâtel The University of Neuchâtel (UniNE) is a French-speaking university based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The university has four faculties (schools) and more than a dozen institutes, including arts and human sciences, natural sciences, law and eco ...

and Daniel McCloy, Researcher at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

Principles of PHOIBLE

PHOIBLE attempts to be faithful to the description of languages in source documents (often called "doculects") and to encode all character data in a consistent representation in Unicode API. Its data is published under the

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 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/lyrics ...

3.0 licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Organisation of the database

The website is very similar to those of

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for ...

WALS WALS (102.1 FM) is an American radio station broadcasting a country music format. Licensed to Oglesby, Illinois, United States, the station serves the LaSalle-Peru area. Branded as WALLS 102, the station is currently owned by Laco Radio and fe ...

and

APiCS APICS, currently known as the Association for Supply Chain Management is a not-for-profit international education organization offering certification programs, training tools, and networking opportunities to increase workplace performance. Fo ...

. Since the release of PHOIBLE 2.0 in 2019, the data is taken from the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF) dataset of the

Cross-Linguistic Linked Data The Cross-Linguistic Linked Data (CLLD) project coordinates over a dozen linguistics databases covering the languages of the world. It is hosted by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary An ...

(CLLD) project. The languages are classified by family, geographical coordinates and world regions (Africa, North and South America, Australia, Eurasia and Papunesia). The individual language pages include geographical information from Glottolog, with a link to its site with the glottocode of the language, and another with the

ISO 639-3 ISO 639-3:2007, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages – Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages'', is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. It defines three-letter codes for i ...

code pointing to that of

SIL SIL, Sil and sil may refer to: Organizations * Servis Industries Limited, Pakistan * Smithsonian Institution Libraries * SIL International, formerly Summer Institute of Linguistics * Apex Silver Mines (former American Stock Exchange ticker symb ...

. They also include links to one or more

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

inventories, with associated bibliographic records for each source. Multiple entries are based on separate sources that disagree on the number and/or identity of phonemes in the language. In addition to phoneme inventories, PHOIBLE includes distinctive feature data for each phoneme in each language. This system is loosely based on Hayes' ''Introductory Phonology'' with some additions from Moisik and Esling's ''The 'whole larynx' approach to laryngeal features'', but may change as new languages are added. A subset of 451 languages in PHOIBLE comes from the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database, whose author, Ian Maddieson, is a contributor to the chapter on phonology in WALS.

References

Bibliography

* * * * *

External links

* {{Cross-Linguistic Linked Data Linguistics websites Linguistics databases Cross-Linguistic Linked Data