Lingvisto

Lingvisto is a digital platform designed for linguistic research and language learning, offering tools for corpus creation, annotation, search, and analysis across languages. It emphasizes open data workflows, interoperability, and collaboration among researchers, educators, and developers.

Etymology: The name Lingvisto derives from lingua (Latin for language) and the suffix -isto, used to denote a practitioner, signaling its focus on language-related study and work.

History: The project originated in a collaborative effort among computational linguists and software engineers in the late 2010s. An alpha prototype appeared in 2018, with a public beta in 2019 and a stable release in 2020. Since then, it has been maintained by an international community and integrated into university curricula and field documentation projects.

Features: Lingvisto provides a central repository for text and audio corpora, multi-layer annotation (linguistic tiers), search and concordance tools, phonetic transcription with IPA, segmental and syntactic tagging, and playback alignment. It supports multiple data formats, an extensible plugin architecture, and an API enabling programmatic access to data and analyses.

Usage and reception: In academia, Lingvisto is used for corpus linguistics, field linguistics, and pedagogy. Its open architecture facilitates replication of studies and sharing of annotation schemes. Critics point to the learning curve and the need for robust data governance.