Phonotacticon: a cross-linguistic phonotactic database

Abstract

Phonotacticon is a cross-linguistic database that contains syllabic phonotactic information about spoken lects (linguistic varieties), including the possible forms of the onset, nucleus and coda of each lect, as well as the phonemic and tonemic inventories. In this paper, we present Phonotacticon 1.0, which contains the phonotactic profiles of 516 Eurasian lects retrieved from descriptive literature. The later versions of Phonotacticon will extend beyond Eurasia and will ultimately cover spoken lects in all macroareas. As an example of the research potential of this database in future studies, we have generated from Phonotacticon several descriptive visualizations, such as the distribution of the maximal onset length, to demonstrate the visually discernible areal distribution of certain phonotactic patterns.