Grammar Watch disseminates open access grammars, so the most important credits go to authors, institutions and publishers openly sharing grammatical descriptions.

The first version of Grammar Watch was initiated by Frans Plank, and a distinguished roster of contributors ensured broad coverage of grammars from around the world (see History below). The bibliographical task of tracking grammatical descriptions is now ably served by Glottolog. A later version of Grammar Watch focused on grammars available online; it was collated by Martin Haspelmath and based in part on earlier Grammar Watch listings.

The current version of Grammar Watch was created by Mark Dingemanse, who also maintains the Grammar Watch group library. Sterre Leufkens, Florian Matter and Jorge Rosés Labrada are contributing curators. This site runs on free and open source software. It uses ZotPress connected to a Zotero group library to display rich bibliographies in WordPress.

Historical note

We preserve here Frans Plank’s description of the state of Grammar Watch in 2006, which eloquently captures the reason to take grammars seriously:

Although it only covers about a decade, and cannot claim completeness, the list is already longer than those which entire previous centuries could take credit for. With grammarwriting a growth industry, linguistics, long remarkably uncurious and given to hasty generalization, is, for the first time, seriously closing in on its subject matter, human language in all its manifestations. As each grammar is a token of our profession’s respect for a culture, so is the attention we pay to each grammar a measure of our self-respect as theoretical linguists.

The listings have been compiled by Peter Bakker (Pidgins, Creoles, Mixed; Romani; Americas), Hilary Chappell (Sino-Tibetan, Tai, Austroasiatic, Hmong-Mien), Nick Evans (Australian), Alice Harris (Caucasus), Larry Hyman (Sub-Saharan Africa), Aleksandr E. Kibrik (The Caucasus), Marianne Mithun (The Americas), Edith Moravcsik (Finno-Ugric, Baltic, Slavic – with help from Istvan Kenesei, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, and Bernard Wälchli), Malcolm Ross (Pacific), Wolfgang Schellinger (The Rest), Anna Siewierska (North Africa, Near and Middle East – with Jouni F. Maho contributing much on African and Afroasiatic), and Frans Plank (here, there, and everywhere), with occasional help from Dan Slobin. Thomas Mayer and Tatsiana Mayorava

(Frans Plank in ALT News, April 2005/March 2006)