[Lingtyp] Ethnologue goes for paid access?

[Anna Belew]

Hello all,

With apologies for being so late to the discussion, we wanted to take this
opportunity to call attention to an important additional tool which fills
some of the free-data niches recently vacated by the Ethnologue's move to a
pay model: the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) (see
endangeredlanguages.com). ELCat is an NSF-sponsored collaborative project
by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Eastern Michigan University,
with a website built in collaboration with Google. ELCat's focus is on
endangered languages, meaning it includes information on roughly 46% of all
the world's languages; for these languages it provides information similar
to that found in Ethnologue and Glottolog, as well as additional
information:

   - Listings of endangered languages by region and country
   <http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/lang/region>
   - At-a-glance overviews of language locations, speaker counts, language
   vitality, codes, dialects, and classifications
   - Language vitality assessments using a newly designed metric, the
   Language Endangerment Index (LEI) -- see Lee & Van Way's forthcoming
   article in *Language in Society* for more details on the LEI.
   - Clear citations for all data (no citationless speaker counts!)
   - Bibliographies for each language
   - User-submitted content such as audio and video recordings, news media,
   and wordlists pertaining to each endangered language
   - Functionality for users to directly submit suggested additions and
   corrections to ELCat data
   - A responsive editorial team, supervised by an international board of
   advisors, which addresses user suggestions in a thorough and timely manner
   (more general information about ELCat's organization can be found here
   <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iSAD2DO2iGfDfPmx-mjyS4fVRmihzjBqgp3mamzkqt8/edit>
   )

ELCat goes to great lengths to make its information the most up-to-date and
accurate possible. We warmly encourage you to visit ELCat at its home
within the Endangered Languages Project (www.endangeredlanguages.com), and
to share any thoughts you may have on how to make ELCat's resources better
known to a wider linguistic community. And of course, if you notice that
any of ELCat's data on any language can be improved, we very much hope
you'll let us know (email feedback at endangeredlanguages.com).

Best wishes,
Lyle Campbell and Anna Belew (on behalf of the ELCat team)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20160228/36260676/attachment.htm>