About

This is an unofficial search frontend for PHOIBLE.

Searching

A search query is minimally composed of a search term. There are two types of search term.

A phoneme term consists of a phoneme enclosed in forward slashes, optionally preceded by "no". This will find all doculects that have (or don't have, if there's a preceding "no") the given phoneme.

For example, /t̪ʙ/ will return all doculects that contain the phoneme represented in PHOIBLE by the text string t̪ʙ, and no /m/ will return all doculects that do not contain the phoneme represented in PHOIBLE by the text string /m/.

A feature term consists of a number (optionally preceded by a < or > sign), a space, and a string of pluses and minuses followed (with no intervening space) by the name of the feature to search. For example, 2 +coronal will return all doculects with exactly two [+coronal] segments, and >30 +syllabic will return all doculects with more than thirty vowels.

For the numeric component of the feature term, no can be used to mean 0, and any can be used to mean +0.

To search for multiple feature values on the same phoneme, separate the feature components with a semicolon. For example, any +syllabic;+consonantal will return a list of doculects with syllabic consonants.

To limit the search to languages with specific properties, use field:value. To limit the search to languages without specific properties, use !field:value. Values are case-insensitive. For example, country:australia will return all doculects that PHOIBLE lists as spoken in Australia. Spaces in the value must be replaced with underscores, as in country:united_states. The available fields are listed here.

Search terms may be joined by the logical operators and and or. These are postfix.

Examples

Find doculects with only two coronal consonants:

2 +coronal
    HAWAIIAN
    PIRAHA
    ROTOKAS
    Pirahã

Find doculects with two or fewer vowels:

<3 +syllabic
    zulgo
    Cuvok
    Buwal

Find doculects with two or fewer vowels or the phoneme /ʰd/:

<3 +syllabic /ʰd/ or
    zulgo
    Cuvok
    Buwal
    Günün Yajich
    Hoti

Find doculects with no rounded segments:

no +round
    Oneida
    NIMBORAN
    Gu'de

Find doculects with /ʰd/ and no /m/:

/ʰd/ no /m/ and
    Hoti

Find doculects with no non-glottal fricatives spoken outside Australia:

no -sonorant;+delayed_release !country:australia and
    Auyana
    Nasioi
(etc. - 19 results)

Find doculects with no labial plosives spoken in the United States:

no +consonantal;+labial;-dorsal;-continuant;-sonorant country:united_states and
    Wichita
    ALEUT
    CHEROKEE
    EYAK
    WICHITA
    Huron
    Tanacross

List of features

These are taken directly from PHOIBLE's featural decomposition, except the names of the features have been converted from camelCase to snake_case and 'raisedLarynxEjective' and 'loweredLarynxImplosive' have been renamed to ejective and implosive.

  • tone
  • stress
  • syllabic
  • short
  • long
  • consonantal
  • sonorant
  • continuant
  • delayed_release
  • approximant
  • tap
  • trill
  • nasal
  • lateral
  • labial
  • round
  • labiodental
  • coronal
  • anterior
  • distributed
  • strident
  • dorsal
  • high
  • low
  • front
  • back
  • tense
  • retracted_tongue_root
  • advanced_tongue_root
  • periodic_glottal_source
  • epilaryngeal_source
  • spread_glottis
  • constricted_glottis
  • fortis
  • ejective
  • implosive
  • click