Research Guides: Linguistics: Databases

Databases

Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
This index provides access to citations and abstracts of books and book chapters, dissertations, and articles culled from over 1300 scholarly journals in the fields of linguistic research, language research, and research in the areas of speech, hearing, and language pathology. Coverage is 1973 to present.
Anthropology Plus
Brings together two resources: Anthropological Literature from Harvard University, and the Anthropological Index from the Royal Anthropological Institute in the UK. Provides worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies. Offers coverage of all core periodicals in the field in addition to local and lesser-known journals.
eHRAF World Cultures
This database published annually by Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), is a full-text, fully-indexed cultural database. It focuses on mostly pre-industrial cultures from around the world, and on North American immigrant groups. eHRAF differs from and other databases because the documents (e.g. books, journal articles, dissertations) are indexed at the paragraph-level with over 700 subject codes from the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM).
MEDLINE with Full Text (EBSCO interface) This link opens in a new window
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This database covers the international literature on biomedicine, including the allied health fields and the biological and physical sciences, humanities, and information science as they relate to medicine and health care. Indexes over 3,700 journals.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
International coverage of the modern languages and literatures, including film and folklore. Indexes jounal articles, and book chapters in all languages, and N. American dissertations. Coverage 1963 to Present.
OmniFile Full Text Mega
(Combines Social Sciences Abstracts and Humanities Abstracts with other databases) This database provides cover-to-cover indexing for 492 key international English language periodicals in the Social Sciences and 500 English language periodicals in the Humanities. Material include articles, review articles, scholarly replies to the literature, interviews, obituaries, and biographies in the fields of anthropology, economics, geography, international relations, political science, psychology, sociology, archaeology and classical studies, art and photography, folklore, history, journalism and communications, language and literature, literary and political criticism, music and performing arts, philosophy, and religion and theology. It is updated weekly with coverage from 1983 to the present. Abstracting begins with material in 1994.
PsycINFO
This database covers the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines including medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, and other areas. Coverage is worldwide and includes references and abstracts to dissertations and journals.
Web of Science: All Databases
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Web of Science includes Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, and Social Sciences Citation Index. Collectively, these indexes cover 8,700 scholarly and technical journals completely and 13,300 selectively, in more than 230 disciplines. The Web of Science gateway allows searching the indexes singly or in combination. Features include cited reference searching, access to records related to a particular article, and the number of times an article has been cited. Coverage extends back to 1977.

Other Databases

Ethnologue
SIL International, this site offers a 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.
Greek Grammar on the Web
This site is a gateway for the study of the ancient Greek language.
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. 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
The Language Museum is a linguistic website 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. The Language Museum is constructed and maintained by Zhang Hong, a network engineer and amateur linguist in Beijing, China.
Language Varieties
From the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at the University of New England, is about forms of language that differ from the standard that is normally used in the media and taught in the schools. These forms include pidgins, creoles, regional dialects, minority dialects, and indigenized varieties.
Lexicon of Linguistics
From Utrecht institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University, comes this dictionary of linguistics terminology.
Linguistics Resources on the Internet
Links from the SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics).
Modern Language Association Language Map
The MLA Language Map is for students, teachers, and anyone interested in learning about the linguistic and cultural composition of the United States. The Language Map uses aggregated data from the 2006–10 American Community Survey (ACS) to display the locations and numbers of speakers of twelve languages commonly spoken in the United States.
Omniglot: a guide to writing systems
According to the author, Simon Ager, this website provides a guide to over 200 different alphabets, syllabaries and other writing systems, including a few you will find nowhere else. It also contains details of many of the languages written with those writing systems and links to a wide range of language-related resources, such as fonts, online dictionaries, and online language courses.
Rosetta Project
A growing collection of descriptions, texts, analytic materials, and audio files for 1,000 languages from the Stanford University Library. The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone.
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.
Where Do Languages Come From?
An issue of the online magazine Exporatorium, this site offers information on the origin of languages. The magazine is a publication of San Francisco's Exploratorium: the museum of science, art and human perception.
Your Dictionary.com
This site offers more than 1800 dictionaries from more than 250 languages.