An online tool based on dialectometric methods, DistGraph, is applied to a group of Kru languages of Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia and Burkina Faso. The inputs to this resource consist of tables of languages x linguistic features (e.g. phonological, lexical or grammatical), and statistical and graphical outputs are generated which show similarities and differences between the languages in terms of the features as virtual distances. In the present contribution, attention is focussed on the consonant systems of the languages, a traditional starting point for language comparison. The data are harvested from a legacy language data resource based on fieldwork in the 1970s and 1980s, a language atlas of the Kru languages. The method on which the online tool is based extends beyond documentation of individual languages to the documentation of language groups, and supports difference-based prioritisation in education programmes, decisions on language policy and documentation and conservation funding, as well as research on language typology and heritage documentation of history and migration.
@InProceedings{GIBBON16.72,
author = {Dafydd Gibbon}, title = {Legacy language atlas data mining: mapping Kru languages}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
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