DEPiCT - Database of Early Pidgin and Creole Texts
- Database of Early Pidgin and Creole Texts
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The Database of Early Pidgin and Creole Texts (DEPiCT), funded by the German Science Foundation, assembles early attestations and descriptions of contact languages. The texts are annotated and made searchable online. This opens up new avenues for research: DEPiCT will be a standard reference database for historical linguistic studies on contact languages, both for individual languages as well as for comparative linguistic studies, and both from structural as well as from sociolinguistic perspectives. DEPiCT thus serves as an online backup and archive for posteriority, collecting and electronically saving data which at present is scattered among several researchers. It also offers a more complete overview and more comprehensive documentation of the development and history of individual contact languages. Furthermore, by allowing direct comparison between texts, DEPiCT makes it possible to evaluate the reliability of early sources. The comprehensive annotations allow for structural linguistic studies on grammaticalization paths as well as sociolinguistic and sociological studies on language use and attitudes in the early stages of contact languages.