A repository of phonological inventory data for sign language

Supervisor(s): Zifan Jiang & Prof. Dr. Sarah Ebling & Prof. Dr. Steven Moran 

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. Release 2.0 from 2019 includes 3020 inventories that contain 3183 segment types found in 2186 distinct languages.

PHOIBLE is a valuable resource for:

• phonetics and phonology
• typological linguistics research
• computational tasks such as speech recognition

However, PHOIBLE does not contain any sign languages, which is reasonable because sign language phonology differs greatly from spoken languages' phonology.

The main idea of this proposal is to fill this lacuna and to develop a cross-linguistic repository of phonological inventory data for sign language.

• Sign language linguistics
• Python programming
• Database knowledge (bonus)