The Language Commons: Building an Open, Online Encyclopedia and Data Repository for all 7,000 Human Languages.
A web resource with one page for each language and language family, populated with content from the world's language archives, language research organizations, and language documentation projects.
A social network connecting communities of speakers and scholars and enabling them to access and extend the knowledge base for each language.
A consortium of academic, industrial, and government organizations which are concerned with creating and preserving information about the world's languages, and supporting research to advance the state of our knowledge about languages.
Initial Activities
Establishing the Language Commons Collection in the Internet Archive, with a submission system that anyone can use to upload their language materials (prototype submission system).
Establishing Wikilanguage, based on the Rosetta Project's prototype, presented at Wikimania 2010 (slides).
Establishing a Universal Corpus, based on the model presented by Abney and Bird at the Association for Computational Linguistics conference in 2010 (paper), incorporating thousands of the aligned wordlists from PanLex.
Contact
- Ed Bice, Meedan
- Steven Bird, University of Melbourne
- Laura Welcher, Long Now Foundation
- Contact email: languagecommonsadmin (at) googlegroups.com