CommonMorph Project
Our Mission
We aim to build the world's most diverse and comprehensive collection of morphological data by connecting linguists and native speakers across the globe. By crowdsourcing contributions from a wide community, we are creating a resource that reflects the rich variation and complexity of the world's languages—especially those that are under-documented or endangered.
How It Works
Participants contribute by submitting inflect word forms and other morphological structures from their own languages or areas of research. The platform is designed to support a wide range of languages and varieties, allowing users to input structured information. Submissions are reviewed collaboratively. The verified datasets are automatically prepared for download.
Who Can Participate
Our project welcomes contributions from linguists, field researchers, language enthusiasts, and speakers of any language variety. Whether you're a professor documenting case marking in a minority language or a community member sharing the verbal morphology of your native dialect, your input is invaluable. No formal training is required—just familiarity with your language and a willingness to contribute.
Why Morphology?
Morphology—how words are formed and change—is key to understanding the structure and function of any language. Yet, it is often underrepresented in large-scale linguistic databases. By focusing on morphological data, we are filling a crucial gap in language documentation and making this information accessible for typologists, computational linguists, language revitalization efforts, and more.
A Global Collaboration
Languages do not exist in isolation, and neither should linguistic data. Our project is built on the principle of collaboration across borders, disciplines, and perspectives. By bringing together a global community, we aim to create a living, growing database that benefits researchers, educators, and language communities alike.
Research & Presentations
CommonMorph Platform Presentation
Watch our comprehensive video walkthrough demonstrating the CommonMorph platform, its core workflows (expert definition, contributor elicitation, and community validation), and how it streamlines morphological data collection.
CommonMorph: Participatory Morphological Documentation Platform
Collecting and annotating morphological data present significant challenges, requiring linguistic expertise, methodological rigour, and substantial resources. These barriers are particularly acute for low-resource languages and varieties. To accelerate this process, we introduce CommonMorph, a comprehensive platform that streamlines morphological data collection development through a three-tiered approach: expert linguistic definition, contributor elicitation, and community validation. The platform minimises manual work by incorporating active learning, annotation suggestions, and tools to import and adapt materials from related languages. It accommodates diverse morphological systems, including fusional, agglutinative, and root-and-pattern morphologies. Its open-source design and UniMorph-compatible outputs ensure accessibility and interoperability with NLP tools. Our platform is accessible at common-morph.com, offering a replicable model for preserving linguistic diversity through collaborative technology.