The LINGUIST List is a major online resource for the academic field of

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

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

University of Western Australia The University of Western Australia (UWA) is a public research university in the Australian state of Western Australia. The university's main campus is in Perth, the state capital, with a secondary campus in Albany, Western Australia, Albany an ...

, and is used as a reference by the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

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. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is re ...

, now with thousands of subscribers all over the world, where queries and their summarised results, discussions, journal table of contents, dissertation abstracts, calls for papers, book and conference announcements, software notices and other useful pieces of linguistic information are posted.

History

Between 1991 and 2013, the service was run by Anthony Aristar and

Helen Aristar-Dry Helen Aristar-Dry is an American linguist who currently serves as the series editor for SpringerBriefs in Linguistics. Most notably, from 1991 to 2013 she co-directed The LINGUIST List with Anthony Aristar. She has served as principal investigato ...

. In 1991, it moved from Australia to

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

, and

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

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 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 research university in Detroit, Michigan. It is Michigan's third-largest university. Founded in 1868, Wayne State consists of 13 schools and colleges offering approximately 350 programs to nearly 25,000 ...

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 Damir is a common male given name in South Slavic languages. It also occasionally appears in Central Asia and Turkic regions of Russia. It is of Slavic origin, with ''da'' meaning "give"/"take", and ''mir'', meaning "peace". It can also be a va ...

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 system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. * Indiana Univers ...

and it has been hosted at the Department of Linguistics since then, with

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 compu ...

). While the Ethnologue was used as the resource for

natural language In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languag ...

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

constructed language A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction ...

s. The LINGUIST List has also received grants for * the Catalogue of Endangered Languages project, a joint effort with the University of Hawai'i at Manoa 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 (defunct), designed to produce a complete database and tree-viewing facility to study language relationships * 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 with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile ...

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities ...

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

morphosyntax In linguistics, morphology () is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morp ...

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 Cou ...

's and

Ian Maddieson Ian Maddieson (born September 1, 1942 in Watford, United Kingdom) is British-American linguist and professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, in the United States. He has served as Vice-President of the International Phon ...

'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 an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

(NLP).http://gorilla.linguistlist.org GORILLA:Global Open Resources and Information for Language and Linguistic Analysis

References

External links

* {{official website, http://new.linguistlist.org/, LINGUIST List official website Linguistics websites Electronic mailing lists Eastern Michigan University Wayne State University Australian educational websites Internet properties established in 1990 1990 establishments in Australia