General Languages Resources
Internet Resources Home
Discussion Lists and Newsgroups
The Directory of
Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences. Search for
a discussion list by keywords.
Everson's
and Comrie's List of Language Lists. A
comprehensive, long-established list of email discussion
lists related to languages and linguistics.
Harley Hahn's
Usenet Newsgroup list. A searchable and browsable
list of newsgroups on Usenet.
Jiscmail.
Discussion lists for UK Higher Education, many of which
are also open to people outside this sector. You can
search for lists by keyword.
Papyrus
News. A distribution list relating to "the global
impact of information technology on language, literacy,
and education", run by Mark
Warschauer of the University of Hawaii.
TeachTech.
A listserv for teachers of language teachers and the use
of technology in second language learning.
Fonts for Languages and Phonetics
ANSI
Character Set. A list of characters 128-255 in the
ANSI character set, used by many non-English languages.
Fonts
in Cyberspace. A list of over 400 fonts for 85
languages, sorted by language, hosted at the Summer
Institute of Linguistics.
Phonetic
Fonts. Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)
IPA fonts for Windows and Macintosh. As well as the fonts
there's documentation on how to install and use them.
Journals
NB: This section contains journals that
aren't dedicated to a particular language.
Language-specific journals can be found in the
appropriate language section.
Australian
Journal of Educational Technology. A tri-annual,
refereed journal. The website has back issues in HTML,
with a search facility.
Language Learning and
Technology. A refereed journal for second and
foreign language educators.
Language
Magazine. A bimonthly magazine for language teachers
in the US, focussing primarily, but not exclusively, on
ESL. There are back issues, book reviews, and conference
reports online, plus a links page and even a section
devoted to language funnies. Formerly American
Language Online.
Reading in a
Foreign Language. A refereed journal published by
the National Foreign
Language Resource Center at the University of
Hawaii. Current and back issues online in PDF.
Language Centres, Departments, and Laboratories
Association of University
Language Centres (AULC). An association of language
centres in the UK and Ireland.
Aston University
School of Languages and European Studies
University
of Leeds Language Centre
Oxford University
Language Centre
University
of Sussex Language Centre
Language Tutors
Tutor
pages: languages. A directory of private language
tutors in the UK, where you can search by language and
location to find tutors in your area. The site is free to
students, but tutors pay an annual subscription fee. The
site also has a free e-book giving in-depth advice on all
aspects of becoming a private tutor.
Linguistics
The AGFL Grammar
Work Lab. Downloadable software for natural language
processing, based on the AGFL (Affix Grammars over Finite
Lattices) system developed at the University of Nijmegen.
AMALGAM
Automatic Mapping Among Lexico-Grammatical Annotation
Models.
Ask-a-Linguist.
A service provided by the LINGUIST
discussion list, Ask-a-Linguist allows anyone to submit
any question relating to languages or linguistics to a
panel of volunteer professional linguists.
CCALAS
Centre for Computer Analysis of Language and Speech.
Centre for Applied
Linguistics. A vast collection of resources for
those interested in "applying research information about
language and culture to educational, cultural, and social
concerns", including papers, databases, clearing houses,
and links.
Contragram.
A research group on contrastive grammar at the University
of Gent, Belgium. Resources on the website include the
Contragram newsletters, a bibliography on contrastive
linguistics, and a Dutch-French-English Contrastive Verb
Valency Dictionary.
Ethnologue:
Languages of the World A comprehensive reference on
over 6,700 world languages, compiled by SIL.
The brief entry for each language, includes its alternate
names, number of speakers, location, and dialects.
fonetiks.org. An
online pronunciation guide with audio clips for selected
languages, primarily English and national variants but
also Spanish, French, Italian, German, Thai, and
Indonesian. The pages take a little while to load as the
audio clips (.wav) are embedded in them, and Macs won't be
able to play the clips as they use Windows Media Player.
In-depth
look at language. A clearly-written short primer for
those new to Linguistics and the structure of languages,
incorporating links to linguistics resources.
Linguists
Federation. The Federation promotes knowledge of
languages by
organising meetings worldwide to practise languages,
usually through the medium of informal clubs and circles.
The website lists existing circles and clubs by country
and town, with contact details for anyone wishing to join
in.
MIT
Open Courseware | Linguistics and Philosophy. The
purpose of the MIT Open Courseware project is to provide
free, searchable, coherent access to MIT's course
materials for educators in the non-profit sector,
students, and individual learners around the world .
At the time of writing (March 2003) the Linguistics &
Philosophy section has two linguistics courses available,
including Introduction
to Linguistics.
Omniglot - a guide
to writing systems. An encyclopaedic and detailed
guide to over 200 different alphabets, syllabaries and
other writing systems, including selected links to further
resources about each system. There's also a selection of
languages links, a bibliography, a small number of
downloadable fonts, and an especially useful section on multilingual
computing dealing with the perennial issue of
displaying and writing in non-Roman character sets. Behind
a deceptively quiet home page this site conceals a wealth
of resources for linguists. Recommended.
Resources
Linguistiques A long list of links to
language-related sites, written in French.
Robert
Beard's Linguistics Page Includes online
dictionaries and a list of morphology sites.
Rosetta Project.
A global collaborative project intended to create a
permanent archive of over 1,000 threatened or dead
languages. Each language has a section with a linguistic
description, links to resources on the language, and texts
in the language.
Speech accent
archive. A large database of the accentuated speech
of native and non-native English speakers from a wide
range of origins, reading the same English paragraph, with
phonetic transcription.
Summer Institute of
Linguistics (SIL) Resources related to "the study of
minority languages and cultures around the world."
Textalyser. An
online text analyser which will analyse blocks of pasted
text, or a web page from a URL, and parse it to obtain
statistics such as word count, average syllable length,
readability, word frequency, etc. A handy little utility.
Text analysis software
(Intext) . Public domain text analysis software
which runs in 32-bit MSDOS, and is downloadable from the
site. Site text in English and German.
University College
London Department of Phonetics and Linguistics. A
host of linguistics resources, including web tutorials in
phonetics written by students.
Lists and indexes of language resources
NB: The links in this section relate to
multi-language lists and indexes - those specific to a
language can be found in the appropriate language
section of this list.
BBC
Webguide to Languages and Linguistics. A short,
annotated list of links to useful sites on languages and
linguistics.
CALL 4 All.
Described as a "A
Virtual Encyclopedia of all major language learning
links, Web dictionaries and Computer-Assisted Language
Learning organizations in the world" , this site aims
to be the definitive compendium of links to sites and
resources in Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL).
Links are briefly annotated, and sorted alphabetically by
title.
Foreign
Language Resources at Netlearn. A short, but
well-annotated, list of resources, including Internet
Guides in a number of languages (particularly French).
The Human
Languages Page. (aka "I Love Languages".) A resource
containing pointers to tutorials, dictionaries, and even
audio files in a wide range of languages, including some
lesser-known such as Serbo-Croat and Gaelic. One of the
most comprehensive collections of language sites on the
WWW. Recommended.
Language
Links. A list hosted by the Modern Languages
Department of St. Peter's School, York, UK.
Lingu@net
Europa. A database of Internet resources for
education and training, organised by language. Site text
in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Lingu@net is an EU initiative.
Lingu@NET at
NCET "A one-stop language centre". Pointers to
language resources.
Search
Languages: Language Resource Directory. A Yahoo-like
searchable directory of language resources on the Net,
sorted by category, including resources in Arabic and
Chinese.
URIEL.
Italian, Spanish, French, English, and German links.
Virtual
Tourist Pre-Home Page Comprehensive guide to all the
WWW servers in the world, and local and regional
information.
Web Resources
for CALL Lab Managers. An annotated and categorised
collection of links particularly aimed at managers of CALL
Laboratories (eg training, setting up labs) and ESL
teachers.
Yahoo!
Social Science:Linguistics and Human
Languages:Languages:Education
Yahoo
subject tree: Countries WWW sites in countries
worldwide sorted by category.
Miscellaneous
RealAudio
site guide. A searchable list of sites using
RealAudio technology.
Sabbatical Homes.
A listing service for academics going on sabbatical to
other countries, who want to let or rent homes for the
sabbatical period. At the time of writing (July 2000) the
service was free for an introductory period.
TV
Schedules at EuroTV. Programme schedules for all the
major TV channels in Europe, sorted by country.
Newspapers and periodicals
NB: Links to newspapers and periodicals in a
specific language (eg La Stampa, La Vanguardia) can be
found in the appropriate language category in this list.
Kidon
Media-Link A comprehensive collection of links to
media sites (including newspapers, magazines, TV and
radio) worldwide, sorted by continent and country. Perhaps
the most comprehensive list of its type on the Internet.
The Paperboy.
A comprehensive list of online newspapers, sorted by
country.
Online Dictionaries and Grammars
NB: This category contains links to
multi-lingual dictionaries/grammars and lists of
dictionaries/grammars. Those dedicated to a particular
language (eg French) or language pair (eg
French-English) can be found in the appropriate language
category.
Alternative
Dictionaries Words you wouldn't usually find in
dictionaries (slang, idioms, swear words) in a wide range
of languages. You can contribute your own entries to a
dictionary.
bab.la Language Portal.
This site has a sophisticated online dictionary with a
good number of language pairs, including Arabic, Chinese
and Hindi as well as the 'usual suspects'. Results are
detailed, including usage examples, sound clips, synonyms
and hyperlinks to related terms. The site also has:
- interactive quizzes
and games for
learners
- verb
conjugators
- tools and
plugins (apps, browser plugins, etc)
- learner discussion
fora
- phrase dictionary
with four categories of register (business, academic,
job applications, personal)
The site interface is available in all the featured
languages. Quite a gold mine, and kept up to date.
Recommended.
Babylon Online
Dictionaries. A quite large 'meta-search' engine
enabling the user to search a multitude of online
dictionaries in a range of languages and language pairs,
including English-German,
-Dutch,
-Danish,
-Swedish,
and -Finnish.
The DICT Development
Group. A project to develop a protocol and tools to
develop and query online natural language databases. The
site currently features an interface to several online
English dictionaries, allowing the user to query all or
any of them at one time using advanced search criteria.
Dictionary.com.
Online searchable English dictionary, including links to
other English and non-English
online dictionaries and a glossary of English jargon
terms.
Dutch-French-English
Contrastive Verb Valency Dictionary. An "on-line
dictionary that contrasts the syntactic behaviour of verbs
which are often used as each other's translations but
which are invariably 'false friends', syntactically as
well as semantically. The CVVD systematically outlines to
what extent they correspond and where they differ."
FoxLingo.
A Firefox browser extension which adds translation tools
to the browser enabling you to translate full web pages
using online translation tools. At the time of writing
(March 2007) FoxLingo supports 45 languages.
Glosbe. A multilingual dictionary, working on both crowdsourcing and scraping methods. It appears to get its definitions and translations from existing online dictionaries, with attribution and links, but it does solicit translations and pronunciations from users. It lists "almost every live language" so the word pairings run into the thousands. An interesting experiment and meta-search engine, though some users may prefer to go directly to the source(s) that Glosbe scrapes.
The Internet
Dictionary Project. "The Internet Dictionary
Project's goal is to create royalty-free translating
dictionaries through the help of the Internet's citizens."
You can search online dictionaries for English words in
selected European languages, or vice versa, and download a
Windows application allowing you to search offline.
Insultmonger.
Includes the Swearsaurus, or "How to insult, swear, cuss,
and curse in 180 languages!". Surely a fine companion to
the long-running Alternative
Dictionary.
Internet
Public Library: Dictionaries Ready Reference Links
to online dictionaries.
ITU
Telecommunication Terminology Database (TERMITE).
Search the ITU database for technical terms in English,
French, Russian, and French.
Langtolang.com.
A multilingual dictionary covering English, Italian,
French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Turkish. The
dictionary gives simple one word results. Site text in
English, Turkish, and German.
List
of Dictionaries. Primarily links to bilingual
(English + another language) and monolingual English
dictionaries, including 'informal' works such as the
Hacker's Dictionary, but also some non-English
dictionaries.
NETGLOS.
A multilingual glossary of Internet terminology. Look up
Internet terms in a wide range of (mainly European)
languages.
Oxford Reference: Modern Languages. Online,
searchable versions of Oxford bilingual dictionaries
giving full definitions and etymologies, with a useful
cross-reference feature to follow leads. Language pairs
currently served are English-French, -German, -Italian,
and -Spanish.
Roget's
Thesaurus. An online search form for the famous
English thesaurus.
travlang's
Translating Dictionaries. Online dictionaries in a
wide range of languages, including 'minority' languages
such as Danish and Dutch and even Esperanto. There's also
a downloadable freeware dictionary called Ergane. A highly
recommended site.
A
Web of Online Grammars. A list of links to online
grammars and language lessons, sorted by language. This is
now part of the yourdictionary.com
website.
Textil
sector dictionaryA searchable dictionary of textile
technical terms, in Spanish, English, German, and French.
Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition.
Non-searchable dictionaries/glossaries of in a wide range
of non-English languages, including many non-European and
minority languages. Entries are sorted alphabetically by
page.
yourDictionary.com.
A quite stunning collection of links to online
dictionaries, including speciality dictionaries, in a wide
range of human languages (and some non-human, such as
Klingon). The site also has an searchable English
dictionary (Webster's) and thesaurus, a translator between
English and four European languages, word games, grammars,
and much more. Recommended. (This site incorporates Robert
Beard's Web of Online Dictionaries.)
WordReference.
An online dictionary covering English to Italian, Spanish,
German, and French, and vice versa. It returns full
definitions of words, multiple definitions when words have
multiple meanings (eg "present"), and phrases and
expressions using the word. You can also translate words
on a web page simply by double-clicking them. Recommended.
Organisations
Association for Learning
Technology (ALT). A body devoted to promoting and
facilitating the use of learning technology in UK Higher
Education.
The British
Council. A UK state-funded organisation which
"promotes educational, cultural and technical co-operation
between Britain and other countries".
CALICO. The Computer
Assisted Language Instruction Consortium.
Canadian Association for
Second Language Teachers. Information on the
Association and its activities, selected and annotated
links to sites relevant to second language teachers in
French and English, and selected articles from the
Association journal Réflexions. Site text in English and
French.
CARLA. The
Centre for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition.
CILT Centre for
Information on Language Teaching and Research
EUROCALL.
The European assocation for Computer-Aided Language
Learning.
European
Language Council/Conseil europeen pour les languages
(ELC/CEL)
European
Year of Languages 2001. An initiative of the
European Union to celebrate linguistic diversity and
promote language learning. EYL 2001 involves a Europe-wide
information campaign, managed by an organisation in each
EU member state.
International
Association for Language Learning Technology. The
IALL is "dedicated to promoting effective uses of media
centers for language teaching, learning, and research".
Japan Association for
Language Teaching Based in Japan, JALT is "a
professional organization of people interested in
promoting excellence in language learning and teaching"
LTSN Subject
Centre for Languages, Linguistics, and Area Studies.
Our parent organisation whose purpose is to promote "high
quality learning and teaching across all UK higher
education institutions" by supporting "dissemination,
innovation, and cooperation".
Ontario
Modern Language Teachers Association.
Resource sites
European
Literature - Electronic Texts. A collection of links
to European Literature electronic texts on the WWW, sorted
by language.
FreeTranslation.com.
A web-based machine translation service which translates
free text, or whole web pages, fairly quickly. At the time
of writing, the system can translate from English into six
other European languages, and from three of those
languages into English.
Language Box. A
public repository of language learning materials,
developed by the FAROES project at the universities of
Southampton and Portsmouth, UK. Teachers can register for
an account then share their languages materials. The site
"is
for anyone who teaches languages and who wants somewhere
to host and manage their materials, it's also for
language students that want to record and share good
stuff that they've found. It is free for everybody to
use" . Language Box is free to use, and all materials
deposited within it are available under a Creative Commons
licence, although you can restrict materials that you
deposit to just yourself or registered users.
Language-Learning.net.
Information on language courses, certificates, and
organisations world wide. The site has a 'Course Finder',
via which you can carry out detailed searches for courses
in a particular language.
Project Gutenberg.
The official website of the project to make literary texts
available in electronic form. The project currently has
thousands of texts by a wide range of classical authors in
the original language and in translation.
The
Romance Languages Resource Page. A very large
collection of links to sites related to Romance languages,
sorted by language. Recommended.
Software
CALICO
Software Reviews. Reviews of CALL software, with an
archive sorted by language. You can also register yourself
as a reviewer.
Design
Elements for Interactive Multimedia. A paper by
David Kennedy and Carmel McNaught on pedagogical issues in
multimedia software design, published in the Australian
Journal of Educational Technology.
Developing
Multimedia Courseware. A freely-downloadable book
for developers, or would-be developers, of multimedia
educational software.
Foreign
Language Multimedia Software. A searchable database
of CALL software, categorised by language. Hosted by the National
Foreign Language Resource Centre at the University
of Hawaii, USA.
Italian
Verbs A Mac application for learning Italian verb
conjugation.
Language
Software Reviews. A site with a large number of
reviews of, primarily, language learning software, across
a wide range of languages, including Chinese and Japanese.
Language
Teaching Software. Downloadable CALL authoring
software to produce both disk- and web-based language
exercises.
Multilingual Software
Digest. A large list of pointers to language
software on the WWW, sorted by language.
Small is Beautiful
(SIB). An EU-funded multinational project, based at
the University of Hull, UK, which aims to develop
multimedia CALL for some less widely used languages.
Teacher's Pet.
A very useful, and free, piece of software for English
teachers. The tool is a collection of macros for use with
MS Word, which allow the user to create a range of printed
classroom exercises, such as word jumbles and gapfills.
Teachmaster.
Free software for compiling and learning vocabularies.
Language files can be downloaded to provide the interface
in languages other than Germand or English - at the time
of writing, French, Italian and Portuguese were available.
Translation and Interpreting
Alta Vista:
Translations. Online machine translation of web
pages, either by entering the URL or copying the page
text. The service is named "Babelfish", after the creature
from the cult radio/book series The HitchHiker's Guide
to the Galaxy.
BDÜ. The German
translators association. Website text in German only.
CyberBabel.
A single-page collection of annotated and sorted links for
translators, including translating tools, grammar guides,
and legal translation.
FreeTranslation. An online language translator into
which you can paste text, or a web page URL, and get a
rough and ready translation. The engine handles English
to/from Italian, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and
Norwegian.
Gist-In-Time.
A machine translator which will translate whole web pages,
retaining them in their original format. As with
Babelfish, the results are often risible, but as the site
title suggests, you (just about) get the gist of the text.
At the time of writing, there were six European languages,
and Japanese, available.
International Association
of Conference Interpreters. Information on the AIIC,
and tips for interpreters and students of interpreting.
LOGOS. An online,
searchable, multilingual database of terms. Entering a
search word or phrase produces a page with links to the
word/phrase in context and relevant WWW sites. Also
contains a long list of useful WWW sites (including online
dictionaries) sorted by country.
Reverso online
translator. Online translation of passages of text
and web pages, to/from
English/French/German/Spanish/Russian. Supplying a URL to
the translator will translate the page and the links
within it, and if you click on a link the resulting page
will also be translated - a nice touch.
SysTran. An
online machine translator which allows you to translate
words, phrases, or web pages, into or from English.
Languages supported are French, German, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Italian.
Translated.net.
A free machine translator for a range of language pairs in
European and Asian languages, acting as a promotion for a
translation agency. An interesting wrinkle is that you can
specify a text subject, eg Chemistry, IT, Physics, etc.
The
Translator's Home Companion. A home page for
translators and interpreters.
Useful
links for translators.
Tutoring
Tutor
pages: languages. A directory of private language
tutors in the UK, where you can search by language and
location to find tutors in your area. The site is free to
students, but tutors pay an annual subscription fee. The
site also has a free e-book giving in-depth advice on all
aspects of becoming a private tutor.
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