Abstract
Feature stability, time and tempo of change, and the role of genealogy versus areality in creating linguistic diversity are important issues in current computational research on linguistic typology. This paper presents a database initiative, DiACL Typology, which aims to provide a resource for addressing these questions with specific of the extended Indo-European language area of Eurasia, the region with the best documented linguistic history. The database is pre-prepared for statistical and phylogenetic analyses and contains both linguistic typological data from languages spanning over four millennia, and linguistic metadata concerning geographic location, time period, and reliability of sources. The typological data has been organized according to a hierarchical model of increasing granularity in order to create datasets that are complete and representative.
Highlights
The extended Indo-European linguistic area is unique: no other area of the world is richer in documentation of ancient languages
The Boolean data found in DiACL Typology/ Eurasia can be used to calculate pairwise linguistic distance values between languages or features in the data set
The database DiACL and the dataset Typology/ Eurasia offer a unique possibility for testing a wide range of parameters as influencing language typology
Summary
The extended Indo-European linguistic area is unique: no other area of the world is richer in documentation of ancient languages. Documentation spans over four millennia, something that makes the area important for testing theories on language change and the role of diachrony in explaining linguistic diversity. Ht.lu.se/), is to provide a research data set for the investigation of linguistic diversity with particular utility for the study of diachronic typology.
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