Contributor SPA: Stanford Phonology Archive

The Stanford Phonology Archive (SPA) was the first computerized database of phonological segment inventories. It was inspired by Joseph Greenberg's research on universals and his personal archive of data from notebooks and his memory (Crothers et al 1979, i-ii). The inventories in PHOIBLE Online come from the Handbook of Phonological Data From a Sample of the World's Languages, compiled and edited by Crothers et al 1979, and kindly provided to the Phonetics Lab (University of Washington) by Marilyn M. Vihman. The inventories in SPA include descriptions of phonemes, allophones and comments on phonological contexts for 197 languages. The inventory descriptions were digitized and each phoneme was mapped from its original written description, e.g. d-pharyngealized, to a Unicode IPA representation. Each inventory was also assigned an ISO 639-3 language name identifer. Details are given in Moran 2012, chp 4, and the SPA-to-Unicode IPA mappings are given in Moran 2012, appendix E.

The SPA folder contains data from the Stanford Phonology Archive:

Crothers, J. H., Lorentz, J. P., Sherman, D. A., & Vihman, M. M. (1979). Handbook of phonological data from a sample of the world’s languages: A report of the Stanford Phonology Archive. Palo Alto, CA: Department of Linguistics, Stanford University.

The contents and extraction pipeline for these data are described in (chapter 4):

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 SPA_Phones.tsv. The inventories contain the language name given in the source and their phonemes, allophones and tones. The inventories file also contains additional information in the form of footnotes, which are explained in detail in the original source (Crothers et al., 1979)

We have converted IPA symbols in the raw data in line with the phoible conventions and Unicode IPA as described in the SPA_IPA_correspondences.tsv file.

Note that the ISO 639-3 codes in the SPA source may be out of date with the current ISO 639-3 standard.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.