Resources

Linguist List —a professional list serve, with extensive webpages on language resources, including Ask a Linguist.

Language Log —a scholarly blog on contemporary language and usage from professional linguists' viewpoints

Talkin' About Talk —hear the answers to 20 fascinating questions in brief lectures by linguists

Languages in General

Ethnologue —an online database of information on nearly 7,000 languages

The Language Museum —samples and translations from 2,000 languages around the world

The Rosetta Project —a project which seeks to archive 1,000 languages

I Love Languages —formerly the Human Languages Page. A collection of many links to the study of languages.

Modern Language Association Language Map, based on the 2000 U.S. Census, shows the distribution of over 30 languages spoken in the U.S.

Phonetics/Phonology

Fonts

SIL Phonetics Fonts —free Unicode-compliant phonetics fonts

IPA List of fonts —a list of commercial and free fonts for various platforms

Cardinal Vowels

Daniel Jones' original recording of the Cardinal Vowels

Peter Ladefoged's rendition of the Cardinal Vowels (and Jones')

Phonology

Rutgers Optimality Archive (ROA) —an archive of cutting-edge research which uses Optimality Theory

An Online Phonology Course —learn about basic phonology and Received Pronunciation

Metathesis Website —a large database of metathesis gathered by Elizabeth Hume with an NSF grant.

Accents

International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA)

Speech Accent Archive

Phonological Atlas of North America
British accents and dialects at BBC Voices

British Library's "Collect Britain" English Accents and Dialects

Varieties of English
List of Links for Phonetics/Phonology from University of Washington

Animal Accents

Sounds of the World's Animals -animal onomatopoetics

Historical Linguistics

The History of the English Language —detailed website by Prof. Dan Mosser

Junicode font —link to download the medievalist font designed by Peter Baker, of the University of Virginia.

Old English aerobics —practice reading and pronouncing Old English on Peter Baker's website

Old English pages from Catherine Ball, formerly of Georgetown University

Norton Audio Archive contains recordings of some Old English in translation, some in the original, but much of Chaucer.

Old English Audio Archive

Teaching Resources

Readings of several Old English poems by Steve Pollington

Words: Vocabulary and Lexicology

Word of the Day —Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day; also available are dictionary and thesaurus.

World Wide Words —detailed website on words and etymologies by Michael Quinion

Writing Systems

Omniglot—website on various writing systems

Ancient Scripts —website on ancient writing systems

American Library Association Romanization Tables—standard transliterations for many scripts

Chinese

Zhongwen.com —contains an interactive dictionary by pronunciation, radical, and stroke count.

CJVLang.com —General information

Nushu —Chinese women's script

More on Nushu

Japanese

CJVLang.com —General information

Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese by Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor. Free Book online.

Review of book above by William Poser (default is pdf format).

Societies

American Dialect Society —scholarly publisher of American Speech, and choosers of "Word of the Year"

Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) —the première conference in North America on the linguistics of African languages.

Current ACAL Conference —to be held at the University of Oregon in April 2006

The Dictionary Society of North America —the joy of lex

International Phonetic Association (IPA) —keepers of the International Phonetic Alphabet

Linguistic Society of America (LSA)—the professional society of linguists in the U.S., publisher of Language

World Congress of African Linguistics —held every three years for research on the linguistics of African languages. Next conference in Ethiopia in July 2006.

Language in the News

Language News —a handpicked collection of language-related news

The Language Feed —a very topical collection of news stories dealing with language issues

(You can also sign up for a weekly email.)

Geoffrey Nunberg —Stanford linguist and commentator on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air"

Humor

John Cowan's Essential English —"This page comprises a list of 735 'essentialist explanations' of the form 'Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z'". It's funnier than it sounds.