on May 26th, 2008WALS Online
This is one of the more exciting new sites I’ve seen on the web in quite some time. It’s called WALS Online - for “World Atlas of Linguistic Structures,” and it’s a map database of language-by-characteristic-features. From the homepage:
WALS consists of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and “hand”/”arm” polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1110 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether 2,650 languages are shown on the maps, and more than 58,000 datapoints give information on features in particular languages.
I haven’t played with it much yet, but it looks rather promising. A news blog is available here.