Curating and extending data for language comparison in Concepticon and NoRaRe

There are more than 7,000 spoken and signed languages in the world today. They vary in their vocabulary and structure their lexicon differently to some degree. Standardizing this diversity is a challenge for researchers interested in language comparisons. Therefore, we use a set of tools that facilitate the standardization of data so that they become comparable. Using these tools, we created a database with a list of words that appear in studies by historical linguists who want to find out how languages are related to each other. Our goal was to create a catalog of standardized words and links to the lists in which they appear. To this end, we reformatted the available data into a simple text file format to make them comparable across languages. This database is called Concepticon. When we added metadata that described various properties of the words to the Concepticon, we noticed that a wealth of additional data existed. These data provide information about when a particular word was acquired, how often it changes its meaning over time, or which words it is associated with. For this reason, we decided to create a separate resource for these types of data: the Database of Norms, Ratings, and Relations (NoRaRe). NoRaRe is an extension of Concepticon and uses a customized workflow to add new data. Here, we introduce the most recent release of Concepticon Version 3.0 and NoRaRe 1.0. We illustrate the content of the two resources, our approach to adding more data, and present a web application that allows for convenient exploration of the data.