Robert Forkel

The late Robert L. Carneiro was a prominent anthropologist who devoted his life to the study of political evolution and the evolution of complex societies. In the 1960s and 1970s, he and his colleagues created a cross-cultural dataset for their Scale Analysis project, collecting ethnographic and historical data on hundreds of cultural traits in more than a hundred societies worldwide. Although Carneiro presented the results of the project in several papers, the dataset itself has not yet been published. Here we present a digital version of two editions of the dataset, based on Carneiro’s documentation stored in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History. The 4th edition contains 127 societies and 354 cultural traits, and the 6th edition features 74 societies and 618 traits. Both represent unique sets of coded cross-cultural information that can be used as a comparative source to other cross-cultural datasets, as a starting point for one’s own collection of cross-cultural data, and for quantitative testing of cultural evolutionary hypotheses.

We argue that, in order to maximize reusability of cross-linguistic data, it is useful to think about it in terms of a type system. Type systems are enforceable rules guiding the interpretation of data in computer programs. Thus, they link data values to valid operations which can be performed on them. Clearly, the reusability of research data is determined largely by the availability of suitable analysis methods. A clear idea of cross-linguistic data types will enable development of analysis methods as well as a mechanism to match valid data with appropriate operations. The Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF) initiative provides a toolkit to model such cross-linguistic data types, and in recent years we have seen a paradigm (and an associated process) arise of how new types can be added to CLDF through stepwise conventionalization. Additionally, data types provide a useful selection criterion to group datasets for unified curation. Thus, a type system for cross-linguistic data will provide actionable metadata to guide data curation and inform data reuse.

The GramAdapt Social Contact Dataset is a curated dataset of 34 language pairs with qualitative and quantifiable data on social interaction and aspects of societal multilingualism. The language pairs were sampled globally to represent the world’s linguistic diversity. The dataset can be used to interrogate the social dimensions of language contact independently or in conjunction with appropriate linguistic data. The data were collected by distributing a questionnaire to experts who have experience with either one or both of the language communities of a pair. The data represent subjective expert assessments based on choices from predetermined answers which can be quantified. Authors 1, 2 and 3 manually checked the response to identify possible misjudgments or misunderstandings. This results in a dataset containing 13,493 data points. This dataset is a first of its kind in the field of linguistics, built upon wide findings from sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and linguistic anthropology.

Asher and Moseley’s Atlas of the World’s Languages illustrates the past and present spatial distribution of human languages across more than 100 maps. While the Atlas is an impressive resource, its data are not readily accessible for research. Language areas are presented as printed maps and referenced by name, rather than as digital spatial objects linked to a standardised language catalogue. To address these limitations, we present a digital dataset derived from the Atlas. We georeferenced the map images, digitised the language polygons in a Geographic Information System (GIS), and linked each polygon to a Glottocode — a unique identifier for languages and language varieties. Following the FAIR principles, we provide the data as a faithful digital replication of the Atlas (comprising 6,992 distinct language areas) and in enriched, aggregated versions for contemporary and traditional languages. The datasets capture the spatial distribution of human languages as depicted in the Atlas, with each polygon linked to an unambiguous identifier, enabling computational analyses of the origins, distribution, and drivers of global linguistic diversity.

The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary has served as an important resource for the comparative study of Austronesian languages since Robert Blust started its compilation in 1990. Likewise, the Micronesian Comparative Dictionary – an online database of Proto-Micronesian Reconstructions previously published in Oceanic Linguistics by Byron Bender and colleagues – is an important reference point for comparative Linguistics. The legacy, online versions of both dictionaries share an uncertain future, and both have not been available in a structured format, amenable to quantitative methods. Thus, to preserve the content of both dictionaries for the scientific record and to increase interoperability of the data, we undertook a conversion of the dictionaries to CLDF datasets. While programmatic access to the data within each dictionary already provides a new level of usability, the true potential of data in CLDF lies in interoperability across datasets. This is particularly useful for the two dictionaries presented here, because Micronesian languages belong to the Austronesian family and so the Micronesian data could potentially complement the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary. With the CLDF datasets we lay the groundwork for tackling this challenge.

Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words and other constituents from each other with astonishing precision. The acoustic properties that support this process are not well understood and remain understudied for the vast majority of the world’s languages, in particular regarding their potential variation. Here we report cross-linguistic evidence for the lengthening of word-initial consonants across a typologically diverse sample of 51 languages. Using Bayesian multilevel regression, we find that on average, word-initial consonants are about 13 ms longer than word-medial consonants. The cross-linguistic distribution of the effect indicates that despite individual differences in the phonology of the sampled languages, the lengthening of word-initial consonants is a widespread strategy to mark the onset of words in the continuous acoustic signal of human speech. These findings may be crucial for a better understanding of the incremental processing of speech and speech segmentation.

Wurm & Hattori’s Language Atlas of the Pacific Area describes the geographic speaker areas of the languages and language varieties spoken in the Pacific. Thanks to the efforts of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, this monumental piece of work has been available in digital form for over 15 years. But lacking proper identification of language varieties, this digitized data was largely unusable for today’s research methods. We turned ECAI’s digitized artefacts of the Language Atlas into an open, reusable geo-referenced dataset of speaker area polygons for a quarter of the world’s languages. This allows for much more refined analysis methods to, for example, analyse language contact in the area of the world with the highest linguistic diversity. We also describe a number of tool applications and quality checks which may be useful for methodological development in similar digitization efforts.

Every human has a body. Yet, languages differ in how they divide the body into parts to name them. While universal naming strategies exist, there is also variation in the vocabularies of body parts across languages. In this study, we investigate the similarities and differences in naming two separate body parts with one word, i.e., colexifications. We use a computational approach to create networks of body part vocabularies across languages. The analyses focus on body part networks in large language families, on perceptual features that lead to colexifications of body parts, and on a comparison of network structures in different semantic domains. Our results show that adjacent body parts are colexified frequently. However, preferences for perceptual features such as shape and function lead to variations in body part vocabularies. In addition, body part colexification networks are less varied across language families than networks in the semantic domains of emotion and colour. The study presents the first large-scale comparison of body part vocabularies in 1,028 language varieties and provides important insights into the variability of a universal human domain.

Although the peopling of Remote Oceania is well-documented as a general process of eastward migrations from Island Southeast Asia and Near Oceania toward the archipelagos of Remote Oceania, the origin and the development of Polynesian societies in the Western Pacific (Polynesian Outliers), far away from the Polynesian triangle, remain unclear. Here, we present a large-scale geochemical sourcing study of stone artifacts excavated from archeological sites in central Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and the Caroline Islands and provide unambiguous evidence of multiple long-distance voyages, with exotic stone materials being transported up to 2500 kilometers from their source. Our results emphasize high mobility in the Western Pacific during the last millennium CE and offer insights on the scale and timing of contacts between the Polynesian Outliers, their neighbors in the Western Pacific, and societies of Western Polynesia.