SEAlang Projects

F A Q Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

L I B R A R Y The SEAlang Library was established in 2005, with primary funding from the U.S. Department of Education's TICFIA program, and matching funds from CRCL. The Library provides language reference materials for Southeast Asia. Through 2009, it focused on the non-roman script languages used throughout the mainland, and in 2010-2013 it will concentrate on the many languages of insular Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Resources include:
- bilingual and monolingual dictionaries,
- monolingual text corpora and aligned bitext corpora,
- tools for manipulating, searching, and displaying complex scripts,
- specialized reference works, including historical and etymological dictionaries.

L A B The SEAlang Lab develops assistive technology for reading, writing, and vocabulary acquisition in complex-script languages. Our focus is Thai, but the same ideas apply to languages from Arabic to Urdu. The proposal summarized here has been funded by the U.S. Department of Education's International Research and Studies program for 2006-2009, and includes demonstration software that was the topic of the Interagency Language Roundtable's September 2005 plenary session.

MON-KHMER Long before the rise and fall of the great Funan, Dvaravati, and Angkor empires, Mon-Khmer languages were the lingua franca of Southeast Asia. They are as key to interpreting Asia's cultural, political, and economic history as Greek, Latin, or Gothic are to understanding Europe; in their own right, and for their influence on and by the Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, and Tai-Kadai families. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2007-2009, and the assistance of leading scholars in the U.S., England, Germany, Australia, Singapore, and Thailand, the Mon-Khmer Languages Project is assembling a century of data, linking it to modern comparative analyses, and making it accessible for research, reference, and education.

C L A S S I C S Southeast Asia's golden age of epigraphy spans more than a millennium, from the 5th through the 15th centuries. The SEAclassics Library of epigraphic texts, Indic and epigraphic dictionaries, and research-oriented software tools will make this widely scattered body of work, including the Cham, Mon, Khmer, Pyu, Burmese, and Tai inscriptional corpora, accessible to the international scholarly community. A demonstration of the Corpus of Khmer Inscriptions is available on line.

A R C H I V E S The SEAlang Archives make rare and important texts available on line. It includes images (usually in DjVu format) and electronic texts (as available). Resources include many unpublished manuscripts in Mon-Khmer, Sino-Tibetan, and Kra-Dai linguistics from the field's great scholars, including the Luce Papers, the Shorto Papers , the Huffman Papers, and historic theses, including Gedney's Indic Loanwords in Thai (1947).

S E A C A T Most Western libraries catalog SEA text using the Library of Congress / ALA romanization guidelines. These are difficult to apply consistently, and equally difficult to search. The SEAcat project provides tools to:
- catalog Southeast Asian texts following the LC/ALA rules;
- use either native orthography or romanization to search both romanized and native catalog entries.

O T H E R CRCL has collaborated on many projects over the years, including work on Tibeto-Burman languages (European Research Council ASIA - Beyond Boundaries project), the development of tone languages (ERC EVOTONE: The emergence and evolution of linguistic tone), the LORELEI low-resource language project (LORELEI - DARPA ), and preservation of important journals and publications for Asia-Pacific languages. All results are freely available for re-use under the Creative Commons open license.