CanIL Comparative African Wordlists Project

The CanIL Comparative African Wordlists Project stores wordlist data and makes it publicly accessible for the purposes of language revitalization and promotion of historical and comparative linguistic reconstruction in Africa.

Given that comparative wordlists are organized differently, comparing data from one list with data from another list is not always easy. For example, while the word for "child" is number 203 in the Comparative African Wordlist that is used for many Kwa languages spoken in Ghana, the word for "child" is number 66 in the Benue-Congo Comparative Wordlist that is used for many Benue-Congo languages spoken in Nigeria. This, of course, makes it difficult for anyone who wishes to use data from both sets in order to carry out comparative reconstruction in Niger-Congo languages.

The Comparative African Wordlists Project is developing an online database that cross-references comparable items from different African wordlists. All list items are indexed against a master conglomerate list with items that have been categorized using a standard SIL semantic domain hierarchy. Linguists can easily compare data collected with different wordlists. Researchers will be able to both upload their data and download comparative data sets.

Resources including the the Comparative African Wordlist, a template Toolbox database, and other information is available through the Resources menu above. If you are interesting in submitting data, more information is available through the Submitting data menu above. Watch here for further developments or contact larry_hayashi@sil.org or keith_snider@sil.org.