Online linguistic descriptive materials

[Harald Hammarström]

On Wed, 16 May 2007, Peter Kahrel wrote:

> Dear Harald,
>
> Thanks very much for your wonderful list. From memory? What else do have in 
> there?

I reckon there are grammars or grammar sketches for about 800 languages
freely accessible on the web (though many of them are not modern,
descriptive data is remarkably long-lived). Here are a few more sites
that I can think of now with fair amounts of materials, again, of course,
forgetting many equally valuable places:

1) Roger Blench homepage 
http://www.rogerblench.info/Publications%20opening%20page.htm
I regret that this site did not come to mind in the last email. Though
there is not so much grammatical typology here, the lexical, comparative,
and phonological data for such an incredible range of hard-to-find-data
African are invaluable. My favourites are the Plateau, Dogon and Kordofanian
stuff. I really admire Blench's dedicated work -- pure sought-after
descriptive data and free from academic pirouettes and selfishness.

2) Web resources for African languages
http://goto.glocalnet.net/maho/webresources/index.html
Links to online papers on all topics in african linguistics, excellently
sorted and kept up to date by my indefatigable Gothenburg colleague
Jouni Maho.

3) Education Resources Information Center http://eric.ed.gov/
A fair amount of miscellaneous sketches and a hundred or so Peace
Corps language manuals.

4) Ressources documentaires de l'IRD http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/
Mainly french works most of which on Chadic languages but also some nice
older Gabon articles (for some newer stuff on Gabon lgs check Lolke van
der Veen's pages at U Lyon).

5) FSI Language Courses http://fsi-language-courses.com/
Pedagogical materials on the world's major languages incl. also .mp3
soundfiles. Something for your non-typologist friend who likes languages
but is afraid of Papua and Amazonia?

6) Archivo de Lenguas Indígenas de México http://www.colmex.mx/alim/coleccion.html
Page by page view of twenty or so works in this series.

7) U Buffalo recent dissertations 
http://wings.buffalo.edu/soc-sci/linguistics/people/students/dissertations.html
A bunch of phd grammars here (apuriña being the major rarity).

8) Archive of the indigenous languages of Latin America (AILLA)
http://www.ailla.utexas.org/site/welcome.html
Fieldnotes, recordings and an occasional grammar. Some monster
rarities such as Uruak, Katukina & Canamari (by Migliazza) and
Hod"i (by Mattei-M"uller).

9) KITLV journals http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/
The whole of Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde from
1950 and on! Fully searchable.

10) Amerindia http://celia.cnrs.fr/Fr/Amerindia.htm
The whole of the Amerindia journal (surprisingly you will, among other
things, find a Hmong grammar sketch).

11) Mon Khmer Studies http://www.mksjournal.org/
All of this journal which includes a lot of descriptive data.

12) ANU E-press http://epress.anu.edu.au/
A couple of rich Austronesian comparative-archaeological books.

Several of the sites mentioned were highlighted to me by others, 
most commonly John Kalespi, Peter Bakker or Mikael Parkvall.

> I've added your list to the list of interesting links on the ALT web site if 
> you don't mind.

Keep the link list if you want but please do not put my name there.

all the best,
H