We present the speech corpus SMALLWorlds (Spoken Multi-lingual Accounts of Logically Limited Worlds), newly established and still
growing. SMALLWorlds contains monologic descriptions of scenes or worlds which are simple enough to be formally describable. The
descriptions are instances of content-controlled monologue: semantically “pre-specified” but still bearing most hallmarks of spontaneous
speech (hesitations and filled pauses, relaxed syntax, repetitions, self-corrections, incomplete constituents, irrelevant or redundant
information, etc.) as well as idiosyncratic speaker traits. In the paper, we discuss the pros and cons of data so elicited. Following that,
we present a typical SMALLWorlds task: the description of a simple drawing with differently coloured circles, squares, and triangles,
with no hints given as to which description strategy or language style to use. We conclude with an example on how SMALLWorlds may
be used: unsupervised lexical learning from phonetic transcription. At the time of writing, SMALLWorlds consists of more than 250
recordings in a wide range of typologically diverse languages from many parts of the world, some unwritten and endangered