About Sound Comparisons: Funding

Funding and History of the Sound Comparisons* Research Project*

From July 2001 to June 2004, the Sound Comparisons research project, database and website(s) began with Sounds of the Andean Languages, with its original explorer website in both English and in Spanish.
This was created by Paul Heggarty, based at the (then) Dept of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Sheffield.
This phase was supported from within a three-year research project Quantitative Methods in Language Classification (PI April McMahon), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. Specific funding to produce the Sounds of the Andean Languages website website and an accompanying CD‑Rom was provided by an additional end-of-grant dissemination award, also from the AHRC.

From March to June 2007, this short phase set up an early version of Sound Comparisons, which has since become Sound Comparisons: Englishes.
This was created by Paul Heggarty during a three-month research post at the Dept of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh.
This phase was supported within a two-year research project Sound Comparisons: Dialect and Language Comparison and Classification by Phonetic Similarity (Oct. 2005 to Sept. 2007), research grant 112229 (PI April McMahon), also funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. Specific funding to produce the website and an accompanying CD‑Rom was provided by an additional end-of-grant dissemination award, again from the AHRC.

From July 2006 to September 2009, Sound Comparisons underwent a major expansion, with extensive fieldwork to add all three main European branches of Indo-European languages.
This was done by Paul Heggarty, while based at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.
Support for this phase was provided by the Leverhulme Trust, through its funding of the research project European Populations: Languages and Origins (PI Colin Renfrew, lead investigator Paul Heggarty).
This phase created what has now become Sound Comparisons: Germanic, Romance and Slavic & Baltic.

From September 2010 to September 2015, the project head Paul Heggarty was based at the former Dept of Linguistics, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Details can be seen at the entries on the department's research pages for Sound Comparisons and Sounds of the Andean Languages.
Support for this phase was provided by the Linguistics department (director: Bernard Comrie), through its funding from the Max Planck Society (ultimately funded by the German taxpayer).
This phase involved a complete reprogramming from scratch, to create the new and more powerful Sound Comparisons website, essentially as it is today. The design and functionality were by Paul Heggarty, and programming by Jakob Runge with support from Hans-Jörg Bibiko.
Thee new website phase brought together all previous datasets, and this phase also expanded the original Sounds of the Andean Languages project, added the new Sounds of Mapudungun, and expanded the Romance, and Slavic studies in particular. It also included most of the work for what has now become Sound Comparisons: Celtic, and began a pilot study on ten indigenous languages of Brazil.

From September 2015 to September 2021, the project head Paul Heggarty was based at the Dept of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, although relocated to MPI-EVA in Leipzig from Ocotber 2020.
Details can be seen at the entry for Sound Comparisons on the department’s research pages.
Support for this phase was provided by the DLCE department (director: Russell Gray), through its funding from the Max Planck Society (ultimately funded by the German taxpayer).
This phase added the Vanuatu study, completed the pilot study on Brazil](https://soundcomparisons.com/Brazil), and partially extended various existing studies, in particular on Celtic and Germanic.
Ongoing programming work to further develop the Sound Comparisons website has been mostly by Hans-Jörg Bibiko in this phase.

From September 2021 to the present, the project head Paul Heggarty has been based at the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Support for this phase is provided by the DLCE department (director: Richard McElreath), through its funding from the Max Planck Society (ultimately funded by the German taxpayer).
This phase has taken over the web hosting for Sound Comparisons, and will continue to add individual recordings to various components.