Introducing CHIRILA

I am very pleased to announce that the first phase of CHIRILA (Contemporary and Historical Resources for the Indigenous Languages of Australia) has been released. This represents approximately 180,000 words from 155 different Australian languages. It is a subset of the full database (of approx 780,000 items); eventually I hope to be able to release most of the data. Currently, the first phase is that for which we have explicit permission, or which is already in the public domain.
The material is hosted at pamanyungan.net/chirila; please see the web site for more information about the contents of the database, how to download data, what formats are available, and the like. We do not provide a web interface to the data; you download it and use excel or a database program to read the files.
We hope the data will be useful to researchers, community members, and others with an interest in Australia’s Indigenous language heritage.
pamanyungan.net/chirila also includes access to the preprint of a paper describing the database (both the online and full versions).

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