Research Guides: Linguistics: Web Resources

Humanities Research Librarian

Contact:

jglover2@vcu.edu
(804) 828-6555
Cabell Library, Room 121F

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Subjects: Anthropology, Diversity, Gender, Race and Ethnicity, History, Language and Literature, Philosophy and Religious Studies

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Professional Organizations

These organizations contain basic useful background information and resources about linguistics. Visit them if you are developing a greater understanding of the field and/or considering going into it yourself.

Center for Applied Linguistics
The Center for Applied Linguistics is a nonprofit organization promoting access, equity and mutual understanding for linguistically and culturally diverse people around the world.
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) was founded in 1924 to advance the scientific study of language. LSA plays a critical role in supporting and disseminating linguistic scholarship both to professional linguists and to the general public.

Corpora

Many corpora are available online, some free and some not. Below is a brief selection of English-language corpora. To find more corpora, try starting with the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org).

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
The only large, genre-balanced corpus of American English. 560,000,000+ words of text, equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts.
Corpora list from English-Corpora.org
Heavily used online corpora, available at the same site as COCA.
Corpus Concordance English
Multiple corpora derived from written and spoken English.

Tools

This is a selection of tools and collections of tools that may be useful for your work.

AntConc
A freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis.
Google Books Ngram Viewer
Easy-to-use tool to search one or more terms across a wide body of texts in many languages.
The Linguist List
A forum where academic linguists can discuss linguistic issues and exchange linguistic information.
Natural Language Toolkit
A platform for building programs to work with human language data. Python-based, free, open source, and available for standard computing platforms.
OLAC Language Resource Catalog
Open Language Archives Community catalog of data, tools, and advice for the study of human language.
PHOIBLE
PHOIBLE is a repository of cross-linguistic phonological inventory data, which have been extracted from source documents and tertiary databases and compiled into a single searchable convenience sample.
TextBlob
TextBlob is a Python (2 and 3) library for processing textual data. It provides a simple API for diving into common natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, noun phrase extraction, sentiment analysis, classification, translation, and more.
UCREL Tools Page
A selection of corpus tools and related resources.
WALS Online
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials.