CLDF: Cross-Linguistic Data Formats
The amount of available digital data for the languages of the world is constantly increasing. Unfortunately, most of the digital data are provided in a large variety of formats and therefore not amenable for comparison and re-use. The Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative proposes new standards for two basic types of data in historical and typological language comparison (word lists, structural datasets) and a framework to incorporate more data types (e.g. parallel texts, and dictionaries). The new specification for cross-linguistic data formats comes along with a software package for validation and manipulation, a basic ontology which links to more general frameworks, and usage examples of best practices.
Publications from this project
rcldf: R library for reading CLDF files
@article{Greenhill2026, title = {rcldf: R library for reading CLDF files}, author = {Greenhill, Simon J.}, journal = {Journal of Open Source Software}, volume = {11}, number = {125}, pages = {10811}, publisher = {The Open Journal}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.21105/joss.10811}, url = {https://simon.net.nz/articles/rcldf/}, }Lexibank, a public repository of standardized wordlists with computed phonological and lexical features
@article{List2022, title = {Lexibank, a public repository of standardized wordlists with computed phonological and lexical features}, author = {List, Johann-Mattis and Forkel, Robert and Greenhill, Simon J. and Rzymski, Christoph and Englisch, Johannes and Gray, Russell D.}, journal = {Scientific Data}, volume = {9}, number = {1}, publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media LLC}, year = {2022}, doi = {10.1038/s41597-022-01432-0}, url = {https://simon.net.nz/articles/lexibank/}, }Managing Historical Linguistic Data for Computational Phylogenetics and Computer-Assisted Language Comparison
@misc{Tresoldi2022, title = {Managing Historical Linguistic Data for Computational Phylogenetics and Computer-Assisted Language Comparison}, author = {Tresoldi, Tiago and Rzymski, Christoph and Forkel, Robert and Greenhill, Simon J. and List, Johann-Mattis and Gray, Russell D.}, publisher = {The MIT Press}, year = {2022}, doi = {10.7551/mitpress/12200.001.0001}, url = {https://simon.net.nz/articles/managing-historical-linguistic-data-for-computational-phylogenetics/}, }Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics
@article{Forkel2018, title = {Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics}, author = {Forkel, Robert and List, Johann-Mattis and Greenhill, Simon J. and Bank, Sebastian and Rzymski, Christoph and Cysouw, Michael and Hammarström, Harald and Haspelmath, Martin and Kaiping, Gereon A. and Gray, Russell D.}, journal = {Scientific Data}, volume = {5}, number = {1}, publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media LLC}, year = {2018}, doi = {10.1038/sdata.2018.205}, url = {https://simon.net.nz/articles/cross-linguistic-data-formats/}, }