General Linguistics

• Stephen Chrisomalis' Phrontistery (formerly Forthright's Phrontistery): a wonderful reference site for information on unusual words. Updated perhaps yearly (once much more often). Specializes in collections of lesser-known words on a particular theme, as well as on numerical terminology.
• Take Our Word For It: An excellent online source for etymology and grammatical pedantry. Updated biweekly, with large archives going back to 1998 or so.
• SIL's Ethnologue, a collection of information on all of the world's 6,912 known living languages (as of early 2006).
• Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Qureshi's KryssTal: Various interesting pieces on languages and linguistics, including a list of the major languages of the world (by number of speakers) and origins of common words and names.
• Zhang Hong's Language Museum, a collection of sample texts from over 2000 languages.
• Ancient and Extinct languages: A list of several hundred languages not included in the Ethnologue, with basic information on each.
• Simon Ager's Omniglot: a collection of writing systems (abjads, alphabets, syllabic alphabets, syllabaries, et. al.) from around the world, along with articles and other resources.
• Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary

Phonetics

• Paul Meier's IPA Chart: excellent recordings of each of the standard IPA phones. (Flash)
• The University of Iowa's fənɛtɪks: the sounds of spoken language: recordings, videos, and animation of the sounds of English, German, and Spanish in those respective languages. (Flash)
• Handbook of the IPA: Sound Recordings: Audio files of words expressing each distinctive sound in various languages. (WAV)
• Kevin Russell's practice exercises: The most basic of several excercises in phonetics. This one is silent, but all the others use sound clips.
• The Université de Lausanne's Cours de phonétique: line drawings of POAs with recordings of the basic phones. (AIFF)
• NTNU's A Sound Reference to the IPA (MP3)
• UV's Phonetics Laboratory (wav)
• UCLA Phonetic Lab Data (AIFF)
• UCLA's IPA Sound Search (various)
• IPA Chart

Languages

These are resources on various languages, especially less common ones.

• Rotokas: Irwin Firchow's Form and Function of Rotokas Words

Corpus Linguistics

Without good working knowledge of how language is actually used, it is difficult to form correct linguistic theories. Modern technology has made the study of million-word corpora feasable; the Web has made it accessable. Here's a list of links useful for CBL:

• General corpora
  • Collins Wordbanks Corpus Concordance Sampler: 56 million words in 3 corpora (10M American, 46M British), with query searches and collocations.
  • BNC: with nicer searchable versions from Mark Davies.
  • International Corpus of English (with manuals): see the ICE-GB Sample Corpus for UK English.
  • Reuters-21578 Text Categorization Collection: A 28 MB corpus of news English from 1987.
  • ARTFL Project
  • W3-Corpora search engine
• Spoken corpora
  • Switchboard Corpus
  • MICASE
  • TRAINS Spoken Dialogue Transcriptions
  • LDC American English Spoken Lexicon
• Tools
  • VLC Web Concordancer
• ILASH resources: links to many corpora, spoken (broadcast, microphone, telephone, et. al.) and text (newswire, et. al.), as well as other CBL sites, including their Moby page.
• LDC Online
• David Lee's resources on CBL

Phototactics

Phonotactics is the study of legal combinations of sounds in various languages.

• English phonotactics on Wikipedia: includes lists and descriptions of possible onsets and codas, as well as special syllable-level and word-level exceptions.
• Sonority hierarchy on Wikipedia and SIL International (formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics)
• Karen Chung's Introduction to Phonetics (includes 5 pages on phonotactics)
• William Shetter's Unpronounceable Sounds, a short essay on phonotactics
• Dafydd Gibbon's Phonotactics notes
• Fred Cummins' notes on phonotactics
• Erik F. Tjong Kim Sang's Machine learning of phonotactics (alternate link)
• Erik F. Tjong Kim Sang and John Nerbonne's Learning Simple Phonotactics
• Conlang examples:
  • Garrett Jones' Minyeva
  • Doug Ball's Skerre

Computational Linguistics

• The ACL's Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology: dated, but worth reading for an overview
• Language identification:
  • Textcat Language Guesser: online, recognizes 77 languages
  • Xerox Language Identifier: online, recognizes 47 languages
  • Lextek Language Identifier: online/downloadable, recognizes 260 languages
  • Gregory Grefenstette's Comparing two language identification schemes: an older paper (PDF) on the subject

Conlangs

• zompist bboard: discussion of conlangs, conworlds, and general linguistics
• Conlanger.com
• Pablo Flores' Language creation site
• Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit
• David Peterson's Notes on Language Creation

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