#mpi eva

Conventions for interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses

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About the rules

Comprehensive reference information for the world's languages, especially the lesser known languages.

Information about the different languages, dialects, and families of the world ('languoids') is available in the Languages and Families sections. The References section contains bibliographical information. You can query the bibliographical database by filtering the table view or using a complex query involving genealogical affiliation, document type, and macro-area.

Catalogue of languages and families

Glottolog provides a comprehensive catalogue of the world's languages, language families and dialects. It assigns a unique and stable identifier (the Glottocode) to (in principle) all languoids, i.e. all families, languages, and dialects. Any variety that a linguist works on should eventually get its own entry. The languoids are organized via a genealogical classification (the Glottolog tree) that is based on available historical-comparative research (see also the Languoids information section).

Bibliography

The References section ('langdoc') provides a comprehensive collection of bibliographical data for the world's lesser known languages. It provides access to more than 180,000 references of descriptive works such as grammars, dictionaries, word lists, texts etc. Search criteria include author, year, title, country, and genealogical affiliation. References can be downloaded as txt, bib, html, or with the Zotero Firefox plugin.

Östen Dahl: “How WEIRD are WALS languages?”, paper at the MPI EVA Linguistics closing conference, May 3rd, 2015

Searching for bountiful fruit crops in the rain forest, chimpanzees remember past feeding experiences.

Where do you go when the fruits in your favourite food tree are gone and you don’t know which other tree has produced new fruit yet? An international team of researchers, led by Karline Janmaat from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, studied whether chimpanzees aim their travel to particular rainforest trees to check for fruit and how they increase their chances of discovering bountiful fruit crops. The scientists found that chimpanzees use long-term memory to remember the size and location of fruit trees and feeding experiences from previous seasons using a memory window which can be two months to three years ago.

This web site contains supporting electronic material for the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (APiCS), a publication of Oxford University Press. APiCS shows comparable synchronic data on the grammatical and lexical structures of 76 pidgin and creole languages. The language set contains not only the most widely studied Atlantic and Indian Ocean creoles, but also less well known pidgins and creoles from Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Australia, including some extinct varieties, and several mixed languages.

APiCS Online is a separate publication, edited by Susanne Maria Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber. It was made possible by support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

APiCS Online contains information on 76 languages and 130 structural features, which was contributed by 88 contributors. There are 18525 examples illustrating the features and feature values. In addition, APiCS Online is designed to allow comparison with data from WALS (the World Atlas of Language Structures).