to work together with Zama Harald Hammersström, who unfortunately can't be here today, and
we have a project which is called Glottalog Langdog, and which is cataloguing linguistic
diversity. So I'll talk a little bit about linguistic diversity research. It's a very
nice chart Steve produced, and I'll just reuse it today. So here you see the languages of
the world, which have between 100 million and 1 billion speakers, and there are eight.
That amounts to 0.1% of linguistic diversity of the world, and you get between 10 million
and 100 million that's 77 and so on. So there are about 5% of the languages of the world
which have more than 1 million speakers, and 95% which have less than 1 million speakers.
And if you go down here, you see that about half of the languages of the world are below
10,000 speakers, and that's the languages we're interested in. Of course, there's little
known about those languages compared with bigger languages, but it's important for a
number of reasons to still investigate those languages. So the task at hand, if we want
to do really digital humanities here, is first we have to identify those linguistic varieties
and to make sure that Researcher A and Researcher B are talking about the same thing. And sometimes
linguists want to talk about dialects, sometimes they want to talk about families or other
groupings, so we should also provide identifiers for those other subgroupings. It would be nice
if the varieties would be grouped in a genealogical tree, so that you know X is a father of Y
or X is a sister of Z, for instance. And it would be especially nice if those classifications
would be backed up by references, so that you really can trace the information about
a language to some document someone has written at some point in time. So the first question
would be, does this language exist? Which seems kind of a trivial question, but there
are a couple of languages around floating and classifications being cited and resited
and copied and pasted, and those languages don't exist. I mean, it was a mistake made
whatever in the 50s or the 60s, but those mistakes keep being repeated. So it would
really be nice that every language has some document asserting its existence. And the
other thing would be that we should provide information why we think that language A and
language B are related. A fourth thing which we had initially would be provisions to model
disagreement. So you think that A and B are related. I don't think that A and B are related.
So the model, the software should be able to model this. We found that in the end there
are very few people really working on classification. So it's not worth the effort to program this
properly. So this is the site, which is the result. It's dot log dot org. If you're online,
you can check it out. I won't be talking much about this interface, but if during the talk
you want to navigate, you're welcome. Here you have the language Herbar. It has the ISOCODE
HAM. I chose it because HAMberg starts with HAM. And here you get the genealogy, the sister
languages, the dialects, names, codes, geolocation, and references. So we collate all this, this
reference, this information from various sources. So in the realm of digital humanities, what's
the purpose of glottalog? Well, we provide identifiers for each language, and language
is a cover term for dialect, language, language family. Since we don't want to get into the
trouble of making this distinction, we have 108, and we have 22,000 language. If you compare
this with the ISO 6393 standard, you might be familiar with that. It's about 7,000 identifiers.
Because of the inclusion of dialects and language families, we have more. We have 180,000 references,
mostly to low-resource languages. We have a couple of references for English and for
German and for Japanese, but that's not really the thing we're interested in. But we're interested
in Fijian and Abbichi and languages from the jungle and the South Sea and the Himalayasans.
Languoids and references are interlinked, so we know which reference describes which
language and which language is described by which reference, and it's available as HTML
and RDF. So what do we collect? We include, as for languages, we include every language
or our aim is to include every language for which we have a trace, which means some published
work treating that language. We would like to exclude all languages for which there's
no documentation, because we think that, well, it doesn't exist in the realm of science.
It's not verifiable. We want to group languages into families. We use a very conservative
application of the comparative method, which means that you have to really have solid,
very solid reasons for treating two languages as related. And there are a couple of language
families, like, for instance, Altaic, you might know that, which are proposed to Altaic,
would be a grouping of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic. We do not think that that's sufficiently
proven, but it's an existing hypothesis, and we model that so it can still be found by
a search and provides links to the sub-families, which we do think exist. That functionality
is currently broken, but it was there last week and will be the next week.
And additionally, if you happen to not like our classifications, we also provide the
classifications of another project, which is multi-tree, and then you get the analog
classification and the ruling classification, if you just want to experiment with other
classifications. As for references, obviously, the task at hand is very large, so all references
for all languages of the world would be a bit too much, right? So our aim is to get the
most extensive piece of documentation for every language, and the extensiveness would
be a grammar, is more extensive than a grammar sketch, is more extensive than a dictionary,
is more extensive than phonology, is more extensive than a word list. So we want to
get the highest thing in this hierarchy, and furthermore, get everything we can.
We annotate our data with additional information, so references, and then we can get the
languages are annotated for macro area and for document type, so is it a grammar, is
it a dictionary, is it about Africa, is it about America, and language are annotated
for alternate names they might have, so German or German and Deutsch, for instance. The codes
they might have, the genealogy, the geolocation, the references.
So what can this be used for? There are four use cases, at least four. The first would
be linguistic diversity research, second would be some statistics about the coverage,
third would be some kind of theoretical empiricist argument why that should be the case, and
the fourth would be integration into the semantic web, and I'll go through these in line. So
linguistic diversity researchers, that would be, for the one hand, field workers who want
to, or who are interested in certain areas of the world and want to describe the languages
there, or could be typologists who want to compare all languages of the world to see whether
there's a preference for verb final or verb initial, for instance. So there would be something,
and those people use samples, so they say, okay, I have to have whatever, ten additional
African languages from different language families. So then they say, okay, I want a grammar
of a Beboid language. So there might be 50 languages in Beboid, you don't want to do all this
manually to go all those 50 language names and check whether there's a grammar. So in our model
you can just click on, you can just choose the tree, and that will expand to everything below,
and it will give you all the grammars for Beboid, that's one functionality. Same thing, so
which dictionary for East Nuclear Polynesian languages are there, and how might I get them?
And the nice thing that it's, you can choose any note on the tree, so it's not just in the
European or English, but anything in between. You can also draw a sample, so suppose, yeah,
you can just say, I want 50 languages spread all over the world, balanced according to certain
criteria, that's also built in. So it's quite a quick way to build a bibliography, then from
that bibliography onwards you can start doing your real linguistic research, you can download the
results in a variety of formats. The coverage below the equator on the southern hemisphere should
be close to 100%, so 95, 99, difficult to say, because we had resources, access to various
archives, and very good bibliographies from those areas. In the northern hemisphere it's less good.
Statistics, so when we have all those 180k references, we can actually start doing some statistics
about the coverage of the world, so we could ask which areas are well described, which families are
well described or poorly described. So we could say, well, we know that if we take the ISO codes,
we have about 7,000 languages, and of those 7,000 there are two and a half thousand which have a
grammar, a full grammar, right? And of those which don't have a full grammar, there's still 1,300,
or 1,250, which have a grammar sketch and so on. So if you add this up, there are more than half of
the languages of the world which have either a grammar or a grammar sketch. So yesterday someone
said there are some majority of the languages we know very little about that's close to the truth
but not really the truth, since for a majority of the language, 51%, we have something which is a
grammar. Then you could ask yourself, so which language families are well documented or poorly
documented? So those are the language families which are very poorly documented, so for this
language family of 13 languages, the total of references is 6, which means that you get less than
half a reference per language, so really no close to nothing about this. If you take a look at what
those languages are, four of the top five are from New Guinea, so we should really, if we want to
document language families we know nothing about, we should really be going to New Guinea, that's
the place to go, and sign languages, which is quite interesting. So that's really an area where we
know very little about. And in our particular case, the languages we know a lot about, aside from
English and German and Japanese, is South American languages, mainly because we have a very good
bibliography for that. So for Imara we have close to 1,000 references for six different Amaran
varieties, and the other three are also from South America. Which areas are well or poorly documented?
So the blue thing would be a grammar, good documentation, red would be a grammar sketch, okay,
yellow would be a dictionary, and green would be close to nothing. You see that in the Americas you
get about half of the languages which are really well described, and the quarter which we know
little about. In Africa you get about two thirds which have something like a grammar, same in
Australia, and the areas which are problematic are Eurasia, where you have half of the languages
where we know close to nothing, and again the Papua New Guinea and Pacific region, where you
get about two thirds where we just know very little. The third topic would be this empiricist
thing. I already alluded to those languages floating around, and no one knows what they are,
but they keep being cited over and over again. So we are going towards a document-centric
definition of a language, which means that the chain of scientific argumentation that you read
is always traceable to a document, so maybe your intuitive definition of a language would be a
language is something which is spoken in France, for instance, and we would say, you know, a
language is a collection of facts, we know about it, and those facts are located in documents,
and we can know what the documents are, and we can agree on what the documents are, and we can
put our hands on it and read it. Documents would also include audio files, right? If you have
audio files, then for us it would be a document as well. The fourth thing would be the semantic
web. This is the linked data cloud. Maybe you've seen the linked data cloud, so it's many, many
knowledge bases which are interconnected, so you get geomames, you get UK legislation, you get
governance array, you get Wikipedia, you get the internet movie database, and those knowledge bases
are all those little bubbles there, and they are connected by edges. So it's all data being
collated there. Great resource. The question is, yeah, so why should we care? So what thing would
relate the internet movie database and linguistics? And there's a very nice application which is
called Red Finder, and it goes through this cloud, and so if you want to know what the relation
between Mel Gibson and Syria is, maybe you can just pause a little bit, what could the relation
between Mel Gibson and Syria be? So the relation between Mel Gibson and Syria is that Mel Gibson
is the director of the film The Passion of the Christ, which uses mostly Aramaic language, and Aramaic
language is spoken in Syria. So this is, I mean, it's a fun fact, right? But it's a kind of relation
you wouldn't have thought about, and you need the internet movie database, and you need information
about linguistics to make this. You could say, okay, so I tried this for Dances with Wolves as well,
right? So you should want to connect Dances with Wolves with Lakota, but it's not in there. So not
enough information in there. What do we do? We create a linguistics linked open data cloud and add
more linguistics information. So this is a project which was started under the auspice of the Open
Knowledge Foundation. It's a working group of the Open Knowledge Foundation called Open Linguistics,
and we have this idea of getting many linguistic knowledge bases together. If you Google
linguistics linked open data cloud, you'll get there, right? So the red things would be typological
databases, the green things would be lexical semantic resources like Wiktionary, and the blue things
would be corpora, and you can link them in a variety of ways using RDF and open data principles.
And by doing that, we want to feed more linguistic data into this linked open data cloud that in
the future you can link Dances with Wolves and Lakota and maybe even Dances with Wolves with
Suen, because then you can say Lakota is a Suen language and Lakota is spoken in Dances with Wolves,
and that information is currently missing. So what would be the role of Glottalog in there? Well,
we provide identifiers for language, then that's the hum, I suppose, language. If we have that, if
we have an identifier, all of the knowledge bases can link to. We will facilitate cross knowledge
base queries, and what Glottalog also does currently is we link to other knowledge bases which are
around, not necessarily in RDF, because they don't exist in RDF, but we try to just get them some
traffic so that the information is more visible. So this is a comparison, so Glottalog Langdog is not
the only project of its kind, there are a number of language catalogs, and this is a comparison, so
we all have containers, they might have different colors, but they store the same thing. I chose this
picture because the things you put in there, so that's German glass containers, and they can be
recycled, so you put them in there and then you can recycle them, and they're tagged, so you can
add additional information. And so the thing you might be familiar with is ISO 6393, that's about
7,000 codes for what ISO things are languages, there's disagreement about that, and it's 7,000
codes, they don't have dialects, they don't really have families, so if you want to talk about
dialects and families, you're left alone. That the Ethnologue is kind of, yeah, behind ISO 6393,
this is the linguistic classification of the Ethnologue, so Sepik, Sepikil, Sanyo, and you don't
have codes for those, and for Hewa, again, you have the something. And if you take any linguist
working in any area of the world, and you ask them what they think about the Ethnologue classification
of that area, chances are high that they will just give you a long speech why Ethnologue did it
all wrong. So it's very contested, and we try to be, yeah, a bit better than Ethnologue here. And
Ethnologue doesn't have ancient languages, because they're interested in missionary activities, and
when the language is extinct or dead, then you can't missionary, right? Then Multitree is another
knowledge base, they have these nice geomaps, they have a couple of other informations, like speaker
population, I think, countries, number of speakers. That's also in Ethnologue, by the way, and they
have codes, so they have Sanyo and Sany, the dialects have codes, which is nice. They have this kind
of interface where you can just navigate the tree and drag it around and just explore it in a quite
friendly way. It's similar, one problem is that they reuse code, so they use, they think that my tree
of uptake and your tree of uptake are necessarily the same, so you get the thing that ALTC is used for
one person's micro-altake and for the other person's macro-altake, and that's not the kind of thing
you want, right? If you start reasoning over those with machines, then you get weird stuff. This is
OLAG. OLAG also aggregates resources from various archives. It's technically a bit better, maybe,
than Glottalog, so it has a federated approach. You can put your resources up there, they will be
harvested. It's quite strong on primary data and language documentation data, whereas Glottalog
language would be secondary data, so grammars and dictionaries, no grammary data. It uses OAI
PMH. I always get that actually wrong, but I think this time I got it right. It's not really easy to
interface with OLAG, so it takes on the part of the provider of resources you have to go through
this whole OAI PMH thing. I mean, I'm doing it, but I'm not finished. It uses ISO 603, and there's
some classification, so you can go to Austronesian and Polynesian, but not, you know, Polynesian, and
it has some classification in very detailed. There's the UNESCO Endangered Language Catalog, which
basically tells you which languages are endangered, where they are spoken, and how endangered there
are. I will skip this, and you get the recent Google thing, LCAT, which gives you similar information
and which has this kind of user interaction that you can upload samples if you happen to have some
information about Picaru or video and audio, you can upload it here. It has only endangered
languages because it's the endangered language catalog, and it has this user-generated content.
So, just to say, there are several language catalogs with different FOCAI. Glottalog language
covers all of the whole tree, so dialects, languages, families. We provide classifications with
justifications for subgroupings. They are not on the web interface there yet, but we do have the
justifications. We provide identifiers and we link to other resources, and we hope that in the
future all this other kind of information available with the other projects can be aggregated.
So, the conclusion would be that this interlinking facilitates bibliographic research. It's quite
quick to get the bibliographic information. It opens up a variety of research questions,
like the coverage, and it allows integration of worldwide linguistics into the linguistic
linked open data cloud and by that into the large linked open data cloud. Thank you.