Contributor AA: Christian Chanard and Rhonda L. Hartell (AA)

The inventories in Alphabets of Africa (AA) come from the work of Christian Chanard's Systèmes alphabétiques des langues africaines, an online database of the work of Alphabets des langues africaines, published in 1993 by the Regional Office in Dakar, Senegal, and edited by Rhonda L. Hartell. AA contains the phoneme inventories and orthographies of 200 languages. Incorrect ISO 639-3 language name identifiers and incorrect Unicode IPA characters were updated before the inventories from the online version were added to PHOIBLE (see Moran 2012, chp 4 for details). Christopher Green verified the inventories' contents and in cases where there were discrepencies between Chanard and Hartell, additional resources were consulted to resolve these issues (ibid.).

The AA source data comes from:

Chanard, C. (2006). Systèmes alphabétiques des langues africaines. http://sumale.vjf.cnrs.fr/phono/.

which is a digitization (with some updates) from the book from Hartell:

Hartell, R. L. (1993). Alphabets des langues africaines. Dakar, SN: UNESCO, Bureau Régional de Dakar.

and was compiled here as part of Moran's PhD thesis:

Moran, Steven. (2012). Phonetics Information Base and Lexicon. PhD thesis, University of Washington. Online: https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/22452.

The data are available in phoible long format in AA_inventories.tsv. The inventories contain the language name given in the source and their phonemes and tones. We have converted IPA symbols in the raw data in line with the phoible conventions and Unicode IPA.

Note that the ISO 639-3 codes in the AA source may be out of date with the current ISO 639-3 standard. For more info, see: https://iso639-3.sil.org/.

For up-to-date language codes for each inventory, we maintain a phoible index here: InventoryID-LanguageCodes.tsv.