Publication in Nature Scientific Data: the Areal Typology of Languages of the Americas (ATLAs) database
This paper by Inman, Chousou-Polydouri, Vuillermet et al. introduces a new linguistic database, the Areal Typology of the Languages of the Americas (ATLAs). This resource will be of use to many researchers whose work involves comparing linguistic structures across different languages, and thereby contributes to the field of large data-driven linguistic typology. The Areal Typology of Languages of the Americas (ATLAs) database encodes 265 linguistic features from 17 different featural domains across 220 North and South American languages and 105 languages in the rest of the world. The domains covered in the database were chosen for their regional relevance, and languages were selected on principles of both phylogenetic diversity and geographic coverage. The features of ATLAs are designed to be logically independent, maximizing the reusability of the data for analytical tools which assume logical independence.
The creation of the ATLAs database was funded primarily by the Out of Asia SNSF Sinergia project CRSII5_183578 and the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research Evolving Language.