Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics

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.As part of the CLLD project (cf. http://clld.org) and the Glottobank project (cf. http:// glottobank.org), the work was supported by the Max Planck Society, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and the Royal Society of New Zealand (Marsden Fund grant 13-UOA-121, RF). JML was funded by the DFG research fellowship grant 261553824 Vertical and lateral aspects of Chinese dialect history (2015-2016) and the ERC Starting Grant 715618 Computer-Assisted Language Comparison (cf. http://calc.digling.org). SJG was supported by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DE 120101954) and the ARC Center of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language grant (CE140100041). MH was supported by the ERC Advanced Grant 670985 Grammatical Universals. GAK was funded by NWO Vici project 277-70-012 Reconstructing the past through languages of the present: the Lesser Sunda Islands