Several important grammars (e.g. Guillaume, 2008, Rose, 2011) and typological contributions (e.g. Creissels, 2006; Kopecka, 2006; Grinevald, 2007) have recently been produced by ASLAN members. They have also developed an areal dimension for Sub-Saharan Africa, South American languages, and Caucasus. Moreover, descriptions of grammatical features in interaction have been provided (Traverso, 2006; Gülich & Mondada, 2008). In parallel, studies based on experimental approaches and typological databases have improved our knowledge of the structure of phonological systems (e.g. Coupé et al., 2009) and of their cognitive primitives (Bedoin & Krifi, 2009; Bedoin et al., 2010).
Each published descriptive, naturalistic, experimental or typological contribution unveils a piece of the puzzle, but the overall work to accomplish is still huge. Consequently, the stakes are high in choosing languages and settings of interest and training skilled linguists to produce valuable grammars and to participate to typological debates. In parallel, developing archives of data and typological databases is a necessary but expensive effort.