LINGUISTIC QUESTIONNAIRE FOR FILLING THE “LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD” DATABASE

Abstract

The present paper regards the questionnaire used for compiling languages description for the “Languages of the World” of IL RAS database. The encyclopedia of the same name has served as the main and the only source of information about the languages for many years. But new languages are added to the database faster than new volumes are published. Thus, the problem of finding reliable alternate sources has become very acute. We suggest a linguistic questionnaire to be a solution of the problem. The questionnaire was developed by specialists who have experience of field studies and language description basing on the data received from native speakers (subjects). The questionnaire can be divided into two parts. The first part is a set of questions that only a specialist studying the language or a native speaker with an industry-specific education can answer. The second part includes blocks of sentences for translation from English that a speaker without any linguistic education can do, providing that their level of English is at least B1. The questionnaire contains 138 questions for experts and 1235 sentences for translation. The present article offers examples of such questions and sentences, as well as translation of some blocks of sentences to Ukrainian and analysis of the received data.