SegBo: A Database of Borrowed Sounds in the World's Languages

SegBo is the first large-scale cross-linguistic database of borrowed phonological segments. It is a work in progress by:

• Eitan Grossman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
• Elad Eisen (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
• Dmitry Nikolaev (University of Manchester)
• Steven Moran (University of Neuchâtel)

and can be cited as:

• Grossman, Eitan, Elad Eisen, Dmitry Nikolaev and Steven Moran. 2020. SegBo: A Database of Borrowed Sounds in the World’s Languages. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020). Online: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2020/pdf/2020.lrec-1.654.pdf.

If you use the SegBo data in your research, please cite the specific version for replicability purposes. We archive each release of SegBo in Zenodo.

SegBo data are availble in the Cross-Linguistic Data Format here:

https://github.com/cldf-datasets/segbo

This data format integrates Glottolog metadata about the languages in the SegBo sample.

Preliminary studies based on SegBo have been presented at the following conferences:

• Elad Eisen, Eitan Grossman, Dmitry Nikolaev and Steven Moran. Defining and operationalizing `borrowability' in phonology. 5th Usage-Based Linguistics Conference (Tel Aviv, July 5-7 2021).

• Steven Moran and Eitan Grossman. Temporal bias: a new type of bias for typologists to worry about. 5th Usage-Based Linguistics Conference (Tel Aviv, July 5-7 2021).

• Eitan Grossman, Elad Eisen, Dmitry Nikolaev and Steven Moran. How different were phonological distributions?: The World Survey of Phonological Segment Borrowing and the Uniformitarian Assumption. Societas Linguistica Europaea 52 (Leipzig, August 2019). Slides here.

• Eitan Grossman, Elad Eisen, Dmitry Nikolaev and Steven Moran. The typology of phonological segment borrowing. Association for Linguistic Typology 13 (Pavia, September 2019). Slides here.

• Eitan Grossman and Steven Moran. What 'contact typologists' want from descriptive grammars. Descriptive Grammars and Typology: The Challenges of Writing Grammars of Underdescribed and Endangered Languages (Helsinki, March 2019). Slides here.

• Eitan Grossman. Rethinking the Uniformitarian Hypothesis. Prague Linguistics (Prague, 2019).

The following published work is based on SegBo:

• Steven Moran, Nicholas A. Lester and Eitan Grossman. Inferring recent evolutionary changes in speech sounds. Philological Transactions of the Royal Society B 376: 20200198. Part of special thematic issue on 'Reconstructing ancient languages.' Available here.

• Grossman, Eitan, Elad Eisan, Dmitry Nikolaev and Steven Moran. 2020. Revisiting the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: Can we detect recent changes in the typological frequencies of speech sounds? In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG 2020). Online: https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_paper_182.pdf.

• Grossman, Eitan, Elad Eisen, Dmitry Nikolaev and Steven Moran. 2020. SegBo: A Database of Borrowed Sounds in the World’s Languages. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020). Online: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2020/pdf/2020.lrec-1.654.pdf.

• Eisen, Elad. 2019. The typology of phonological segment borrowing. Hebrew University of Jerusalem MA thesis. Online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341734023_The_Typology_of_Phonological_Segment_Borrowing.

Several articles using SegBo are in the works, and we are working on setting up a website to make the data accessible via a GUI, so stay tuned.