The South American Indigenous Language Structures (SAILS) is a large database of grammatical properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team directed by Pieter Muysken. SAILS Online was programmed by Harald Hammarström using the clld framework, with support from Robert Forkel.
SAILS consists of a number of data subsets (domains) for South American languages not all of which are uniform in terms of the languages covered or the design of the data:
Domain of design | Designer | Features | Languages | Datapoints |
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Further information can be found in the descriptions of the individual (domains). All datasets were published online in 2014 except the SUB dataset which was published online in 2016. SAILS may be thus referred to as SAILS 2014 and SAILS 2016 accordingly.
SAILS Online is a publication, published by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, authored by a team from the Languages in Contact Group (LinC) at Radboud University Nijmegen.
Using SAILS Online requires a browser with Javascript enabled.
You find the features or languages of SAILS through the items "Features" and "Languages" in the navigation bar.
If you are citing data only from a specific domain of SAILS, cite the specific contribution, e.g., for the Noun Phrase (NP) domain:
Olga Krasnoukhova. 2016. Noun Phrase (NP). In Muysken, Pieter et al. (eds.) South American Indian Language Structures (SAILS) Online. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. (Available at https://sails.clld.org)
If you are citing all the data, use:
Muysken, Pieter, Harald Hammarström, Olga Krasnoukhova, Neele Müller, Joshua Birchall, Simon van de Kerke, Loretta O'Connor, Swintha Danielsen, Rik van Gijn & George Saad. 2016. South American Indigenous Language Structures (SAILS) Online. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. (Available at https://sails.clld.org)
The content of this web site is published under a Creative Commons Licence. We invite the community of users to think about further applications for the available data and look forward to your comments, feedback and questions.
SAILS Online was supported by funding from ERC, KNAW and Radboud University Nijmegen.