Forschung und wissenschaftliches Rechnen - Beiträge zum - GWDG

need for an easy access to information about the world’s linguistic diversity
for both scientific and educational purposes is growing continuously.
However, there are few efforts to develop tools that provide such
functionality (a rare example is Kortmann et al. 2004). The Interactive
Reference Tool to the World Atlas of Language Structures has been
developed to fill this gap.
The Interactive Reference Tool (IRT) has been designed as a platform
for visualization of linguistic phenomena worldwide, incorporating multiple
search facilities and tools for generating maps. The program combines easy
install and use for experts and non-experts alike. The data that are currently
available within the IRT are the data as supplied by the World Atlas of
Language Structures, but the program is set up to be easily expandable in
the future. However, to introduce the kind of data that the IRT is supposed
to handle, first a quick introduction to the World Atlas of Language
Structures will be given. After this, the functions as provided by the IRT
will be presented.
1.1. The World Atlas of Language Structures
The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005) is
currently the largest available coherently structured collection of
grammatical information on the world’s languages. The atlas has been
published as a printed book in traditional atlas format. It consists of 142
world-maps—with accompanying texts—on highly diverse characteristics
of language. For example, there are maps showing the number of vowels in
a language, the order of noun and genitive, the existence of a passive
construction, or whether the language distinguishes different words for the
meanings 'hand' and 'arm' or not.
The data have been gathered from descriptive materials as available on
the world’s languages (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than
40 authors, many of them the leading authorities on the subject. Each map
shows a representative sample of the world’s languages, comprising
between 120 and 1,370 languages out of the approximately 7,000 languages
currently spoken around the globe. In the maps, each language is
represented by a dot with different colors and shapes indicating the
different linguistic types. Altogether 2,560 languages are included in the
atlas, and more than 58,000 dots give information on the structure of the
world’s languages. Although endangered languages are not particularly
emphasized in the atlas, they are automatically fore-grounded because each
language is shown by a uniformly formatted dot, independently of its
number of speakers.
Because of the intuitive display in the form of an atlas, the World Atlas
of Language Structures makes information on the structural diversity of the
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