Welcome to WALS Online The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive …

A WALS feature has between 2 and 28 different values, shown by different colours on the maps. Most features correspond straightforwardly to chapters, but some chapters are about multiple features.

The WALS set of languages also occasionally includes pairs in which one is a variety of the other, where the relationship is one of language to set of closely related languages rather than one of dialect to …

Search a languoid by name. Matching names are formatted in bold font for languages, in italics for genera and underlined for families. This search does also take alternative names into account.

WALS Online edited by Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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1. Introduction This chapter discusses the number of vowel contrasts in the inventory of sounds in languages. It complements Chapter 1 on consonant inventories, although in this chapter the number …

3. Geographical distribution By far the most common type are languages which permit moderately complex syllable structure, accounting for about 56.5% of the sample. This type is of course …

1. Introduction This chapter and the next few chapters will look at various aspects of the complexity of the sound resources used in the world’s languages and examine how this complexity is distributed …

WALS Online edited by is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.