Abstract
The Surrey Syncretism Database encodes information on inflectional syncretism in 30 genetically and geographically diverse languages, representing such morphosyntactic features as case, person, number and gender. Syncretism is defined as when some set of words fail to distinguish morphosyntactic feature values which we believe, based on language-internal criteria, to be underlyingly present (for example, in Latin, the dative and ablative cases may be distinct in some contexts but collapsed into a single form in others). For each language all instances of syncretism are recorded.