merkmal

Source

A small C library for phonological features and segment distances.

This page lets you try merkmal without installing anything. It runs locally in your browser via WebAssembly — nothing is sent to a server. Several feature systems are built in (PHOIBLE, BIPA/CLTS, P-base variants, and others); you can also paste your own model.

Scope

Given an IPA grapheme and a feature system, merkmal returns the feature bundle for that segment. Given two segments, it computes a distance based on their features. It can also tokenize IPA strings and produce pairwise distance matrices.

Limitations

merkmal does not align sequences — for that, see regulae. It does not reconstruct proto-forms, and it cannot tell you which feature system is appropriate for your data; that is a theoretical choice the researcher makes.

Register a custom model
IPA keyboard
stops
fricatives
nasals
liquids
other C
vowels
diacritics
tone
supra