Welcome to the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Evolving Language, a nationwide interdisciplinary research consortium that brings together research groups from the humanities, language and computer science, the social sciences, and the natural sciences to solve one of humanity’s great mysteries: What is language? How did our species develop the capacity for linguistic expression, for processing language in the brain, and for consistently passing down new variations to the next generation? How will our capacity for language change in the face of digital communication and neuroengineering?

Our aim is to study the nature of language and how it evolves over time. The NCCR Evolving Language represents an unprecedented level of collaboration and innovation in the research field. Our program combines diverse perspectives to explore language from different angles, including the acquisition and development of language, language processing in the brain, and the evolution of language.

We have curated a comprehensive collection of language datasets that are accessible to the research community. We invite you to explore our collection to further your research and contribute to the advancement of our understanding of language.

Our datasets are categorized into three main research directions: Human communication, Animal Communication, and Human Body. Each research direction has a short description and a link to corresponding datasets.

Our datasets include a wide range of formats, such as audio recordings, transcribed speech, and linguistic annotation, among others. The homepage features a visual representation of all available datasets, providing information such as dataset name, size, date of creation, research direction, and format. Users have the option to sort and filter datasets based on their preferences.

To help users quickly find specific datasets they are interested in, we have included a prominently placed search bar with autocomplete functionality.

We encourage researchers to start exploring our datasets and use them to further their research. For any questions or clarifications, please feel free to contact our team at datascience_request@evolvinglanguage.ch.