Library Guides: Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences: Web Sites

Web Resources

American Sign Language
is maintained by Scott Gaertner. This site has a number of tools for novices and experts alike to help you become proficient at fingerspelling.
Basic Dictionary of ASL Terms
Master's Tech, this dictionary has both animated and text definitions. The text definitions also have letter or number sign images to aid in visualizing the sign.
Community Language Collection
University of North Carolina, Charlotte, this collection includes audio- and text-clips, graphics and full transcripts from 40 speakers of American dialects from New York to Georgia, with most from North Carolina. You may search by narrative theme or by birth date, ranging from 1885-1915.
Ethnologue: SIL Bibliography
Listing of 6,800 main languages only. For 41,000 alternate names and dialects use the site search. Ethnologue.com is a place where you can conveniently find many resources to help you with your research of the world's languages. Ethnologue.com is owned by SIL International, a service organization that works with people who speak the world's lesser-known languages. The language data you will find on this site came from the Ethnologue database.

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The Ethnologue database has been an active research project for more than fifty years. It is probably the most comprehensive listing of information about the currently known languages of the world. Thousands of linguists and other researchers all over the world rely on and have contributed to the Ethnologue database.
LACITO Archive Project
The goals of the Archive Project are to archive linguistic documents associating transcription and recorded speech in a format which guarantees their conservation and their availability for research and disseminate the material to the academic community.

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The archived materials are mainly recordings of speech in unwritten languages, with associated annotation (transcriptions, interlinear glosses, translations, etc.), including synchronization data linking the annotation segment by segment to the recordings. At present, the publicly-accessible part of the Archive contains some 63 documents in languages of Nepal, Tanzania, Comoros, French Guiana and New Caledonia. The Archive is an ongoing project of the research group "Oral Tradition: languages and civilizations" of the French National Center for Scientific Research.
Language Museum
Maintained by Zhang Hong, the Language Museum is a linguistic web site which offers the samples of 2000 languages in the world. Most languages are living, and a few languages are extinct. Each sample includes 4 parts - (1) an image sample, (2) an English translation, (3) the statistics of speaking countries and populations, (4) the linguistic classification consisting of the language's family and branch.

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The Language Museum is constructed and maintained by Zhang Hong, a network engineer and amateur linguist in Beijing, China.
Language Varieties
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at the University of New England. This site is about forms of language that differ from the standard that is normally used in the media and taught in schools. These forms include pidgins, creoles, regional dialects, minority dialects and indigenized varieties.
Rosetta Project
Stanford University Libraries, this site is a growing collection of descriptions, texts, analytic materials and audio files for 1,000 languages. The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone. In this updated iteration, our goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages.

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Our intention is to create a unique platform for comparative linguistic research and education as well as a functional linguistic tool that might help in the recovery of lost languages in unknown futures.
Speech Accent Archive
examines the accented speech of speakers from many different language backgrounds reading the same sample paragraph. Currently, we have obtained 264 speech samples.