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Linked Open Data for West Nilotic Languages: The NILOMORPH Project

Paper · 2026 · Matteo Pellegrini, Matthew Baerman and Oliver Bond

Summary

Several West Nilotic languages, such as Nuer, encode multiple grammatical distinctions at once by changing phonological properties of the stem vowel, including tone, length, phonation and height. The NILOMORPH project studies this rare non-concatenative morphology and aims to reconstruct how it developed from the simpler affix-based systems still found in related varieties. The project combines fieldwork, acoustic and experimental work, simulations, typology and historical-comparative reconstruction. As a result, its data are very heterogeneous: dictionaries, paradigmatic lexicons, raw and glossed texts, ELAN and Praat annotations, and experimental recordings, spanning several languages and modalities.

The authors propose a two-step integration plan. First, legacy materials are converted into community standards: CLDF for dictionaries, texts and glosses, and Paralex for paradigm lexicons. This makes resources of the same type interoperable. Second, everything is modelled as Linguistic Linked Open Data in RDF. Existing vocabularies are reused, and new classes and properties are added where needed, so that resources of different types can be queried together, for example with SPARQL. The work brings previously unrepresented under-resourced languages into the LLOD ecosystem. It also addresses modelling issues that matter here: multilinguality, multimodality and cognacy links across languages.

Key points

  • The languages newly targeted for LLOD coverage are Nuer, Dinka, Shilluk and Thok Reel.
  • The source data include:
    • Kiggen's 1948 Nuer-English dictionary, OCR-processed into a spreadsheet that lists principal parts.
    • The Nuer Lexicon (Bond et al., 2020), with IPA forms and audio.
    • Shilluk narratives (2014–2024).
    • A Bor South Dinka voice-quality and tone dataset with .wav and .textgrid files.
  • CLDF, which builds on CSVW, handles dictionaries, texts and corpora. Paralex, which uses frictionless data packages, handles paradigm lexicons. Paralex can also link sound segments to CLTS and PHOIBLE.
  • A central goal is a multi-variety paradigmatic database with cross-language cognate identification to support reconstructing Proto-West Nilotic morphology.
  • The data will be released in open formats targeting Berners-Lee's five-star open data level. Material under copyright will still go through standardisation and RDF conversion, though it will be kept out of the open release.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of SurreyGuildford · United Kingdom21 works · 677 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

Cite

Cite as Matteo Pellegrini, Matthew Baerman and Oliver Bond. 2026. Linked Open Data for West Nilotic Languages: The NILOMORPH Project. Proceedings of 10th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL-2026).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3idbck5bhajt

@inproceedings{pellegrini2026linked,
  title = {{Linked Open Data for West Nilotic Languages: The NILOMORPH Project}},
  author = {Matteo Pellegrini, Matthew Baerman and Oliver Bond},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of 10th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL-2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3idbck5bhajt},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3idbck5bhajt}
}

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