The notion of the numeral base in linguistics

This article details how the notion of the numeral base has been used by linguists, both in the description of individual languages and as a broader concept for comparing different linguistic numeral systems. Although common linguistic understandings of 'base' are generally not the same as mathematical definitions of the term, they may help us understand the different ways in which languages encode numbers. In the hopes of supporting efforts in comparative linguistics as well as facilitating interdisciplinary studies of numeral systems, this article presents a typology of the various phenomena that may all be considered to be a 'base'.This article is part of the theme issue 'A solid base for scaling up: the structure of numeration systems'.