New academy project "Global Basic Lexicon"

The academy project "Global Basic Lexicon (GloBasLex)" is creating a freely accessible digital database that provides a uniformly recorded basic vocabulary for around 1,500 languages. The project, which is scheduled to run for 15 years and is funded with €520,000 annually, was approved by the Joint Science Conference (GWK) of the German federal and state governments and included in the Academies Program funding.

The project has a clear goal: to create a freely accessible digital collection of basic vocabulary for around 1,500 languages around the world. For each of these languages, 1,000 basic terms will be recorded. In addition to a standardized phonetic transcription, the database will also contain information about how the words are structured. This will make it easier to look up words and evaluate them statistically.

The data should not only provide a more reliable basis for linguistic typology research, but also create an important foundation for data-driven historical linguistics. This will enable new insights to be gained into many previously little-researched language families and regions.

In addition, the GloBasLex database is also valuable for other scientific disciplines, such as cognitive science, archaeology, and genetics, which compare their own research results with linguistic patterns.

GloBasLex will be available to the public as an online language atlas. It aims to spark fascination with the linguistic diversity of the world—a diversity that is increasingly under threat—and raise awareness of smaller languages, thereby preserving an important part of our cultural heritage.

The project of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences will start in 2026, run for 15 years, and will be implemented in Tübingen under the direction of Prof. Dr. Gerhard Jäger.

The joint research program of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities—the Academies Program—serves to develop, preserve, and bring to life our cultural heritage. It is currently the largest research program in the humanities and social sciences in Germany and is unique internationally. It has been jointly funded by the federal and state governments since 1979/80. With the editions, dictionaries, and text corpora produced in the research centers, the academies are creating central repositories of knowledge for the future, which are available to scholars and the public, increasingly in digital form.

* An error had crept into the number of world languages, which has been corrected above.