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In:The Documentarist Turn: From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations
Edited by Sonja Riesberg, Uta Reinöhl and Birgit Hellwig
[Studies in Language Companion Series 240] 2026
► pp. 134–148

Chapter 6
Language archives in context

ORCiD logo with link | University of Cologne
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Abstract
Language archives are a type of research infrastructure that grew out of requirements and efforts of language documentation. From the very beginning of language documentation as a separate research paradigm, it has been accompanied by a strong and vibrant methodological discourse. This discussion of methods and data has not only led to a clear framework of documentary linguistics, but also specified requirements for data and metadata formats, software tools, language archives and ontologies. A whole ecosystem of data infrastructure along with new data types has grown out of this methodological discourse and in close dialogue with language documentation practice.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The emergence of documentary linguistics
  • 3.The technical developments and method
  • 4.Data quality and corpus creation
  • 5.In the research infrastructure landscape
  • 6.In a network of relations
  • 7.Conclusion and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (62)
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