Posts

CLDF for dummies (v1.0)

Image
  I wrote a little document called "CLDF for dummies" based on what I know about CLDF that I think may be helpful to other researchers in language and cultural diversity and evolution. I am NOT a CLDF-developer or editor, this is all from an end-user perspective. I'll keep a full and updated version here . Here is version 1.0: CLDF for dummies This document outlines some of the very basics of the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF) for researchers who want to use the data sets for analysis, comparison or plotting. CLDF is a way of organizing language data, in particular data sets with many different languages in it. The basic organisation is a set of tables, usually in csv-sheets (languages.csv, forms.csv etc). These documents are linked to each other in a specific way which makes it possible to combine them into an interlinked database. The files are all governed by standards, there are sanity-checks to make sure all lines up right. Because they are often just plain csv

A racist map of the world's languages

Image
Detail of world map of languages and races from 1924. The legend outlines language groups of the "yellow race". In order to move forward towards racial and social justice as a discipline we must become familiar with our history and the ways in which racist, colonialist, sexist and classist ideas are still present in our academic spaces. I would like to present to you a concrete piece of evidence of our racist past in particular - a world-map where languages are grouped into three races: white, yellow and black.  I started writing this blog post several years ago, but ended up not posting it because I felt there was so much to say and I wasn't sure I was the right person to say it, nor able to cover all related content in a fair and accessible manner. With the recent publication of the article Toward racial justice in linguistics: Interdisciplinary insights into theorizing race in the discipline and diversifying the profession by Charity Hudley, Mallinson & Bucholtz

Online resources on linguistic typology and beyond

Image
Many Humans Who Read Grammars are also teachers of some kind, myself included. With the world-wide outbreak of COVID-19, most of this teaching is forced to be no longer in a classroom setting, but rather in a remote fashion. This comes with one benefit: if someone can tell it better than you, and a video of it happens to be on youtube, get your students to watch that lecture! So, please find some resources on linguistic typology & co below. First up is a short list of youtube videos on linguistic typology and some related topics. There is an entire MA course called 'Language Typology' from the Virtual Linguistic Campus (Uni Marburg). Here is a link  to the  Virtual Linguistic Campus , featuring many more lecture series on topics in linguistics. The same for this course here , a full course from the NPTEL-NOC IITM channel that contains a lot of courses, also on linguistics. A  set of mini-lessons in linguistic typology by  Isabel Cooke McKay , including topics such as p