LA80: A Lexical Database of 10 Bantu A80 Languages

Abstract

In this paper, we present LA80, a database containing lexical data of 10 Bantu A80 languages (Bekwel, Gyeli, Kol, Koonzime, Kwasio, Makaa, Mpiemo, Njyem, Shiwa and Sso). Data from existing fieldwork datasets have been compiled and formatted. We standardised French translations, corrected spelling mistakes, and merged overlapping data points, resulting in a database with 5,588 concepts. Furthermore, for a subset of 557 concepts available in at least six of the 10 languages, we did additional reformatting by separating prefixes from stems, something that is not done systematically in the source data. The LA80 database can be used for comparative linguistic analyses and diachronic reconstructions.

Keywords

• lexical database
• north-western bantu languages
• corpus analysis
• typology
• lexical reconstructions