Kia Ora!
Random Word: roto ("cloud" in Kahua (Mami))
NEWS: We have a new paper out in Science, "Language Phylogenies Reveal Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement" We answer some frequently asked questions about this research here.
Welcome to the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database.
This database contains 138,864 lexical items from 650 languages spoken throughout the Pacific region. Most of these languages belong to the Austronesian language family, which is the largest family in the world containing around 1,000 and 1,200 languages.
Each language in our database has around 210 words associated with it. These words correspond to basic items of vocabulary, such as simple verbs like 'to walk', or 'to fly', the names of body parts like hand or mouth, colors like red, numbers (1, 2, 3, 4) and kinship terms such as Mother, Father and Person. The full list is here.
We only have between 54.17% and 65% of all of the Austronesian languages represented in this database, and would love to expand this number. If you have data for an Austronesian, Trans New Guinea / Papaun / Indo-Pacific or Australian language or dialect that are not here, please help us out. (We are interested in using Non-Austronesian languages to investigate borrowing).
Warning!
Please do not cite or publish anything using this database without the authors' permission.
1. The extended characters in this database require a modern webbrowser which understands the Unicode specification to be seen properly. Internet Explorer is not standards compliant, and we recommend the use of a real web-browser like Firefox Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, or Opera.
2.There are likely to be transcription errors and the cognate sets are preliminary. We would welcome assistance from professional linguists to correct any mistakes, improve the cognacy judgments and to add further languages.
To cite this database, please reference the following paper. You should also include the date that you obtained the data, as we are constantly improving and correcting the information contained here.
Greenhill, S.J., Blust. R, & Gray, R.D. (2008). The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database: From Bioinformatics to Lexomics. Evolutionary Bioinformatics, 4:271-283.
Contact us by email with any queries, comments or suggestions: Simon Greenhill
Latest News
Added Tawala from Textfile for Tawala Dictionary, by Brian Ezard; provided by Malcolm Ross (Nov 3, 2009). Thanks to Ger Reesink
Added Lungchow. Thanks to Pittayawat Pittayaporn.
Added Besemah. Thanks to Sindi Idwin
Added Acehnese. Thanks to Andras Rajki
Added Sudest from Anderson, M. (1990). Sudest Field Notes. Snyder, D.M. (ed). Dictionaries in Papua New Guinea, Volume 11. Ukarumpa: SIL.. Thanks to Ger Reesink
