Links to Sites about Languages

Below are some links to World Wide Web sites that include information about individual languages.

Language Sounds (from UCLA's Peter Ladefoged, Professor Emeritus)

http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/ladefoge/ladefoge.htm

Professor Emeritus Peter Ladefoged of the UCLA Linguistics Department is arguably the greatest living phonetician, i.e. an expert in the production and perception of language sounds. Though he is now retired, Professor Ladefoged still has an office in the UCLA Linguistics Department and remains active in research and writing. His web site has a link to a very hand's on demonstration of the sounds of the world's languages. Go to the address above and click on the link "A web version of the CD. " For more discussion on phonetics at UCLA and some rather more technical demonstrations, you can visit the UCLA Phonetics Lab website. (There is even a picture of Professor Ladefoged on the set of the movie "My Fair Lady" directing Rex Harrison in how to act like the Phonetician, Henry Higgins!)

Dictionaries on the Web

http://www.yourdictionary.com/

This is a great site! There are links to online dictionaries of over 200 languages, with new ones being added all the time. I have used this site extensively. Some of the dictionaries are excellent, allowing you to put in an English word and get the equivalent in the language and vice versa. Others are not so hot--maybe just a list you scroll scroll. Still others are text files which you have to download to your computer to use. The site also contains links to many other reference sources on languages, including a link to the site just below.

Grammars on the Web

http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammars.html

This site is the grammar parallel to the dictionary site mentioned above. There are well over 100 links to grammars, with links arranged alphabetically by language or language group. Like the dictionaries, the sites themselves vary greatly in detail and quality.

Profiles of languages

http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/

This site, created at UCLA, has "profiles" of over 40 languages, with information about where the languages are spoken as well as sketches of interesting features of languages structure.

The Ethnologue

http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/

The ethnologue is the most extensive list of languages available anywhere. It provides basic information about just about every language in the world that anyone knows about. It gives linguistic classification, areas where spoken, numbers of speakers, variety of dialects, variants in the name of the language or its spelling, and, because the organization in charge of it is a missionary organization, whether or not the Bible has been translated into it. You can look up language by name, but linguistic group, by country where spoken.

Languages on the Web

http://www.languages-on-the-web.com/

This site lists a lot of languages (well over 100, I would say) with links to information about them. You click on a language name, which takes you to a page with further links to grammars, dictionaries, radio broadcasts, and whatever else may be available. A feature of this site is linking to texts in many languages. The same texts appear in many languages, giving a way to compare them. Some are well-known texts like the "Our Father", but a cute aspect is a set of "Daisy" texts, which are little mystery stories translated into lots of languages. I wish the keepers of this site would create a small "front-end" page, though. Their opening page is very large and complex and takes forever to download.

Alan R. King's Language Files

http://www.eirelink.com/alanking/modals/index.html

This is a nice site for specific information about a lot of individual languages. There are little grammar sketches that give basic information about things like the sounds of the language, word orders, case systems, gender, etc. The information is not as detailed as most of the online grammars listed in the second site above, but they are competently done and provide a good start for the languages.

Fonts in Cyberspace

http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/

This site provides links to all kinds of special language fonts. You can download lots of non-Roman fonts for free and use them on your computer. Others, you have to pay for. The information on this site is not real useful for web site creation per se, because web browsers wouldn't recognize the fonts. However, you can download the font, create a file on your computer, turn the file into a graphic, then display it on your web page as a graphic rather than as text. This is what I do for everything that requires phonetic fonts, for example.