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Online Resources
There are a wide variety of online language resources, some are of questionable quality, but others are very good. Be careful and do further research before accepting anything posted as factual. All information is subject to an author's bias that might exclude important information.
- Digital South Asia Library provides access to teaching tools as well as reference and reading texts.
- Ethnologue: Languages of the World information on the 6912 known languages of the world.
- Foreign Service Institute Language Courses were developed for the US Government, but not by a government agency.
- Speech Accent Archive from George Mason University provides sound clips of native and non-native speakers for comparison of different speech patterns.
- Worldwide Schools Language Lessons are developed by the Peace Corps as podcasts and include some sign language lessons. Also available on the main page are videos of daily life in some of the countries the Peace Corps has had a presence.
General and Government Websites
Most countries have websites, which may be the official government site with links to education, culture, research or other information to help you in your research. Some sites are aimed towards tourism or provide a very biased and restricted view of the country, so may not be useful for research, but still useful for reading practice.
How to tell if you have the country's official site? Look at the domain name. It should NOT be a .org or .com. The country code (with the exception of the United States) identifies the country's official server (examples are .fr is for France, .es is for Spain). A complete list of official national websites is at Northwestern University's Foreign Governments site. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority site provides the list of domain names for all countries of the world.