NSF Award
0333727
This collaborative project involves the Rosetta Project at The Long Now Foundation, the LINGUIST List, Stanford University, Eastern Michigan University, the Open Language Archive Community, and the Endangered Language Fund. The investigators are leading a global team of language specialists and native speakers to build a publicly accessible online archive for all documented human languages that serves as the definitive reference work on the languages of the world to date. Rosetta currently serves over 30,000 text pages documenting writing systems, phonology, grammar, vernacular texts, core wordlists, numbering systems, maps, audio files, and demographic/historical descriptions for over 1,000 languages. A major sub-component of the Rosetta archive is the ALL Language Word List Database - a collection of 200 term core vocabulary lists for the languages of the world, currently supporting 1,300 languages. This project supports the growth of this aspect of the Rosetta library with an expectation of increasing the coverage from 1,000 to 2,500 languages. Integral with this effort, LINGUIST is expanding and elaborating the functions of its "people" database - an index of the majority of the world's contemporary linguists, searchable by languages and families of interest, current research and teaching interests, course offerings, and contact information. This database is a critical resource to support the open contribution and peer review process, which builds Rosetta, as well as for educators wishing to find others with related teaching interests and sharable pedagogical materials. A compelling web environment offers "anywhere, anytime" tools for scholars and speakers to contribute and collaboratively view, vet, comment, correct and contextualize all the materials in the archive. These tools are combined with a user-focused site design, enabling both skilled and unskilled users to easily browse, locate, and download materials of interest. The result is an online digital library, which enables educators, researchers and learners to engage language datasets of unprecedented range and diversity. For many languages the Stanford Library and other libraries are providing links to "shelf materials" that provide more depth. This resource is also usable in linguistics courses that focus on properties of language, and it facilitates student research projects. The Cognitive, Psychological, and Language Sciences Program in the NSF Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) is providing significant co-funding of this project in recognition of its value in serving the broader educational goals of BCS and its parent Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.
