World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS)

The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors.

The first version of WALS was published as a book with CD-ROM in 2005 by Oxford University Press. The first online version was published in April 2008.

The 2013 edition of WALS corrects a number of coding errors especially in Chapters 1 and 3. A full list of changes is available  here.

Starting with the 2013 edition of WALS, we will release and publish sets of corrections periodically. Thus, any citation of WALS Online 2013 should include the particular version, as listed on Zenodo.

WALS Online is a publication of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. It is a separate publication, edited by Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2013). The main programmer is Robert Forkel.