The Universal Survey of Languages (USL) is a private demonstration project developed by linguist George Napoleon to provide written and spoken examples of different languages. The site contains informational pages on 38 different languages such as Blackfoot, Afrikaans, Mandarin, Polish, and others as well as several “invented” languages such as Esperanto, Fitsua, Lojban, and the Star Trek‐inspired Ferengi (a true example of “Trekker” ingenuity). Material such as spoken audio files and written texts have all been donated by linguists and others, so the site is a purely voluntary, “collaborative” project with no academic or even commercial sponsorship (Napoleon mounted it using a personal account with an Internet Service Provider). Although the content of these pages is rather sparse, the site is an interesting prototype of what a more sophisticated online multimedia resource devoted to language study might contain. Offering samples of world languages online is an idea whose time has come, and a site such as the USL thus merits investigation.
The individual language pages generally include a short spoken example such as the Lord’s Prayer or a few lines of conversational discourse presented as an .aiff or .au audio file, or occasionally as a .wav file or in the Quicktime format. (Some users have indicated that they have technical difficulty accessing the files with some versions of browsers and plugins.) The examples are recited by native speakers of the languages, but their intonation and pronunciation is sometimes obscured by the poor quality of the recording itself or by the transfer of analog sound into digital formats. Most pages have phonetic or Roman alphabet transcriptions of the spoken text. There is not enough spoken text to give anything more than a “taste” of the nuances of the spoken language, but as Napoleon explains in his introduction to the site, this is an experiment into possibilities of preserving examples of speech on the Web and making them accessible to a global audience. New file formats and advances in digital audio technology will no doubt make it possible to archive more substantial recordings in the future.
The other material offered in the USL is somewhat uneven given the voluntary nature of the project. For certain languages there are essays on topics such as syntax and morphology, but for others there are only brief bibliographies or pronunciation guides. In some cases the essays have been withdrawn from some of the pages to make corrections or updates. The other most prominent features of the pages are the links to linguistics‐related titles offered by a partnership between the site and Amazon.com (the “USL Store”). There have not been any updates since late 1999, and aside from a small and somewhat inactive linguistics discussion board, the site appears to be defunct. I would not recommend this site as a detailed reference resource for the study of living languages, but rather use it as a test case to show future Web developers what they might, given adequate resources and scholarly support, be able to accomplish in putting linguistics information on the Internet.
