PhonixLab

Linguistics research lab · India · Est. 2024

PhonixLab

/ˈfiːnɪks læb/ noun

  1. An independent linguistics research lab, started in 2024 by five researchers from India.
  2. Home to three research papers (one submitted to a journal, two in progress) and a patent application under process.

OriginGreek phōnḗ ‘voice, sound’, the root of phonetics. Spelled like phonetics, said like phoenix.

Fig. 1/ˈfiːnɪks læb/
An illustrative spectrogram of /ˈfiːnɪks læb/, drawn in the style of Praat: formants in red, pitch in blue, and phone and word tiers below.

Research status

Updated September 2026
  • Paper ITitle to be announced
    Research paper
    1. In progress
    2. Completed
    3. Submitted to journal
    4. Published
    Submitted to journal
  • Paper IITitle to be announced
    Research paper
    1. In progress
    2. Completed
    3. Submitted to journal
    4. Published
    In progress
  • Paper IIITitle to be announced
    Research paper
    1. In progress
    2. Completed
    3. Submitted to journal
    4. Published
    In progress
  • PatentDetails to be announced
    Patent application
    1. Under process
    2. Granted
    Under process

About/əˈbaʊt/

An independent lab for the study of language

PhonixLab is an independent linguistics research lab based in India. Five of us started it in 2024. Two years on, we have three research papers and a patent application under way.

We are not part of any university. We choose our own questions, work on them together, and take the results to academic journals. Our first completed paper has been submitted to a journal, and two more are in progress.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language: how speech sounds are made and heard, how words and sentences are built, and how people use language to mean things. That is the ground PhonixLab works on.

The name

PhonixLab is spelled like phonetics and said like phoenix: /ˈfiːnɪks læb/. The first part comes from the Greek phōnḗ, ‘voice, sound’, the same root that gives us phonetics and phonology.

People/ˈpiːpəl/

Five researchers, one lab

PhonixLab is run by five researchers, all from India.

Research/rɪˈsɜːtʃ/

Three papers and a patent

Where each piece of work stands. Titles, abstracts and journal details will appear here as each one becomes public.

Research paperSubmitted to journal

Paper I

Title to be announced

Our first completed paper, now submitted to a journal.

  1. In progress
  2. Completed
  3. Submitted
  4. Published
Research paperIn progress

Paper II

Title to be announced

Research and writing under way.

  1. In progress
  2. Completed
  3. Submitted
  4. Published
Research paperIn progress

Paper III

Title to be announced

Research and writing under way.

  1. In progress
  2. Completed
  3. Submitted
  4. Published
Patent applicationUnder process

Patent

Details to be announced

A linguistics project going through the patent process. We will share details once the application is public.

  1. Under process
  2. Granted

Resources/rɪˈzɔːsɪz/

Resources for linguistics

Tools, data and reading we find useful, from IPA charts and speech software to datasets for Indian languages. Every link opens in a new tab.

Phonetics & the IPA

  • Full IPA chartInternational Phonetic Association

    The official chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, free to download and print.

  • Click any symbol on the chart to hear how it sounds.

  • TypeIt IPA keyboardipa.typeit.org

    Type phonetic symbols in the browser, then copy them into your notes or papers.

  • Seeing SpeechUniversity of Glasgow

    MRI and ultrasound videos that show how each IPA sound is articulated.

  • UCLA Phonetics Lab ArchiveUniversity of California, Los Angeles

    Recordings of words and sounds from a wide range of the world's languages.

Speech analysis tools

  • PraatPaul Boersma & David Weenink, University of Amsterdam

    The standard program for analysing, annotating and synthesising speech. The figure on our home page imitates its display.

  • ParselmouthPython library

    Run Praat's analyses from Python scripts and notebooks.

  • ELANThe Language Archive, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

    Time-aligned annotation of audio and video, widely used in fieldwork and gesture research.

  • Aligns a transcript to its recording automatically, word by word and phone by phone.

  • AudacityOpen source

    Free audio recorder and editor for cleaning up and cutting recordings.

Language data & typology

  • WALS OnlineWorld Atlas of Language Structures

    Maps of grammatical and phonological features across the world's languages.

  • GlottologMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

    A catalogue of languages, dialects and families, with references for each.

  • PHOIBLEPhonological inventory database

    Phoneme inventories for more than 2,000 languages, searchable by sound.

  • EthnologueSIL International

    Reference profiles of the world's living languages. Some content needs a subscription.

  • Universal DependenciesTreebank project

    Treebanks for over 100 languages, all annotated with one consistent scheme.

  • Open, crowd-sourced speech recordings, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Marathi and other Indian languages.

Indian languages

  • BhashiniGovernment of India, Ministry of Electronics & IT

    The national language-technology mission: translation and speech tools, and open datasets for Indian languages.

  • AI4BharatIIT Madras

    Open datasets and models for Indian languages, from speech recognition to translation.

  • Indic NLP LibraryOpen source, GitHub

    Python tools for Indian-language text: normalisation, tokenisation and transliteration between scripts.

  • The national society for linguists in India, publisher of the journal Indian Linguistics.

  • Government institute for research, teaching and documentation of Indian languages.

Computational linguistics

  • NLTKNatural Language Toolkit

    A Python toolkit for working with text, with free corpora and an introductory book.

  • ACL AnthologyAssociation for Computational Linguistics

    Free archive of research papers in computational linguistics and natural language processing.

  • Linguistic Data ConsortiumUniversity of Pennsylvania

    Large speech and text corpora for research, mostly available by licence.

Journals & reading

  • Home of the ‘Illustrations of the IPA’, short phonetic descriptions of individual languages.

  • GlossaOpen-access journal

    A journal of general linguistics, free to read.

  • Laboratory PhonologyAssociation for Laboratory Phonology

    Open-access journal for experimental and lab-based research on sound structure.

  • Language Science PressOpen-access publisher

    Books in linguistics, free to read and download.

  • LingBuzzPreprint archive

    Where linguists share papers before and after publication.

  • A long-running blog in which linguists discuss language in the news.

  • Linguistic Society of AmericaProfessional society

    Guides to the field, to studying linguistics and to careers, plus the journal Language.

  • OmniglotOnline encyclopedia

    An encyclopedia of writing systems and languages, including the scripts of India.

Know a resource we should add? Tell any member of the lab.