The LINGUIST List is an online resource for the academic field of

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

. It was founded by Anthony Aristar in early 1990 at the

University of Western Australia University of Western Australia (UWA) is a public research university in the Australian state of Western Australia. The university's main campus is in Crawley, Western Australia, Crawley, a suburb in the City of Perth local government area. UW ...

, and is used as a reference by the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

in the United States. Its main and oldest feature is the premoderated

electronic mailing list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. Mailing lists are often rented or sold. If rented, the renter agrees to use the mailing list only at contra ...

, with subscribers all over the world.

History

Between 1991 and 2013, the service was run by Anthony Aristar and Helen Aristar-Dry. In 1991, it moved from Australia to

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, TA&M, or TAMU) is a public university, public, Land-grant university, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas, United States. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of ...

, and

Eastern Michigan University Eastern Michigan University (EMU, EMich, Eastern Michigan or simply Eastern) is a public university, public research university in Ypsilanti, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1849 as the Michigan State Normal School, it was the fourth normal ...

was established as the main editing site. By 1994, there were over 5,000 subscribers. From 14 October through 6 November 1996, it held its first on-line conference, ''Geometric and Thematic Structure in Binding'', devoted to the

Binding Theory In linguistics, binding is the phenomenon in which anaphoric elements such as pronouns are grammatically associated with their antecedents. For instance in the English sentence "Mary saw herself", the anaphor "herself" is bound by its anteceden ...

and opened by the keynote address by Howard Lasnik. LINGUIST List moved from Texas A&M to its own site in 1997.

Wayne State University Wayne State University (WSU) is a public university, public research university in Detroit, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1868, Wayne State consists of 13 schools and colleges offering approximately 375 programs. It is Michigan's third-l ...

in Michigan was established as the second editing site in 1998, but in 2006 all its operations moved to nearby

. In 2013, Aristar-Dry and Aristar retired from

and Damir Cavar became the moderator and director of operations. In 2014 Malgorzata E. Cavar became the second moderator. In 2014, LINGUIST List was moved to

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a state university system, system of Public university, public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. The system has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration o ...

and it has been hosted at the Department of Linguistics since then, with Damir Cavar and Malgorzata E. Cavar as the co-directors of the resource operations. The LINGUIST List is funded by its donations from supporting publishers, institutions and its subscribers during the fund drive month each spring. Some LINGUIST List projects were funded by grants from the

. In recent years it has become a site for research into linguistic infrastructure on the web, and has received numerous grants from the

to do this work.

Services

The LINGUIST List hosts two mailing lists LINGUIST and LINGLITE: * , a mailing list that forwards all postings to the subscriber directly or as a daily digest. * , a mailing list that forwards once a day a list of postings with titles and links to the subscribers. The LINGUIST List mailing lists are free and open for subscription using a web interface. Everybody can submit postings to The LINGUIST List lists without being subscribed or in any way a registered member. A web interface is used to submit postings to the lists.

Projects

The LINGUIST List has been one of the resources for the creation of the new

ISO 639-3 ISO 639-3:2007, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages – Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages'', is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. It defines three-letter codes for ...

language identification standard (aiming to classify all known languages with an alpha-3

language code A language code is a code that assigns letters or numbers as identifiers or classifiers for languages. These codes may be used to organize library collections or presentations of data, to choose the correct localizations and translations in comput ...

). While the

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...

was used as the resource for

natural language A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...

s currently in use, Linguist List has provided the information on historic varieties, ancient languages,

international auxiliary languages An international auxiliary language (sometimes acronymized as IAL or contracted as auxlang) is a language meant for communication between people from different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primarily a ...

and

constructed language A constructed language (shortened to conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary, instead of having developed natural language, naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devise ...

s. The LINGUIST List has also received grants for * the Catalogue of Endangered Languages project, a joint effort with the

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa The University of Hawaii at Mānoa is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Hawaiʻi system and houses the main offic ...

to build the most reliable, up-to-date source of information on the world's endangered languages * the EMELD Project, designed to build infrastructure to facilitate the preservation of endangered languages data * the DATA project, designed to digitise data for the Dena'ina language * the LL-MAP project (defunct), designed to produce a comprehensive GIS site for language; * the project, designed to produce a complete database and tree-viewing facility to study language relationships. Charged by

ISO 639 ISO 639 is a international standard, standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) concerned with representation of languages and language groups. It currently consists of four sets (1-3, 5) of code, named after each part w ...

to house data on coded languages that went extinct before . * the project, designed to address the problem of not transcribed, and therefore unavailable, documentation of understudied languages by building an interdisciplinary community of linguists, anthropologists, and computer scientists to share knowledge and collaborate on the specification of a repository and suite of tools to facilitate automatic or semi-automatic transcription and analysis of audio and visual information The EMELD project was the instigator of the

GOLD Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal ...

ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...

, the furthest advanced of the current attempts to build an ontology for the

morphosyntax In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, wh ...

of linguistic data. It has also produced a

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

ontology, based upon

Peter Ladefoged Peter Nielsen Ladefoged ( , ; 17 September 1925 – 24 January 2006) was a British linguist and phonetician. He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book '' A Course ...

's and

Ian Maddieson Ian Maddieson (1 September 1942 – 2 February 2025) was a British-American Linguistics, linguist and professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of New Mexico. He is best known for his work in phonetics and phonological Linguistic typolo ...

's '' The Sounds of the World's Languages''. Some projects emerged from funded or internal activities at LINGUIST List: * , a GIS-based information service that places events, jobs, institutions, conferences, and other announcements with a geo-location that are announced on LINGUIST List on the global map. * , a discussion forum and question and answer platform for linguistically relevant questions and issues. * , a platform for archiving of language data, recordings, word lists, corpora, and technologies, and the development and conversion of language data to corpora and resources that bridge language documentation of low-resourced and endangered languages, and Human Language Technology (HLT) and

Natural Language Processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

(NLP).
GORILLA:Global Open Resources and Information for Language and Linguistic Analysis

References

External links

* {{official website, https://linguistlist.org/, LINGUIST List official website 1990 establishments in Australia Linguistics websites Electronic mailing lists Eastern Michigan University Wayne State University Australian educational websites Internet properties established in 1990 Linguistics databases Cross-Linguistic Linked Data

History

Services

Projects

See also

References

External links