27.4820, Software: English; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects

Fri Nov 25 22:19:06 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4820. Fri Nov 25 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4820, Software: English; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects

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Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2016 17:18:54
From: Bernd Kortmann [bernd.kortmann at anglistik.uni-freiburg.de]
Subject: English; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects

This is to announce the online availability of FRED-S, a 1-million-word
sampler version of FRED, the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects. 

What is FRED?

FRED is a monolingual spoken-language dialect corpus consisting of oral
history interviews conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, with speakers from nine
larger dialect areas in England, Scotland, Wales, the Hebrides, and the Isle
of Man. The corpus consists of sound recordings and orthographic transcripts,
spanning approximately 2.5 million words and 300 hours of speech. The FRED
sampler (FRED-S) comprises 1 million words (ca. 123 hours) from five dialect
areas: the Southwest of England, the Southeast of England, the English
Midlands, the North of England, and the Scottish Lowlands. On the whole,
FRED-S offers access to 121 interviews (139 recordings) with 144 dialect
speakers born between the 1870s and the 1940s. Most of the speakers were born
before 1920 (mean date of birth is 1905) and were aged 60 or older when
interviewed (mean age is 74.5 years at recording date).  

What is available online?

We provide worldwide open access to and a full download option of the FRED-S
corpus free of charge at: https://freidok.uni-freiburg.de/proj/1. The FRED-S
data are accessible in three formats: 1. orthographic transcripts (txt files),
2. part-of-speech tagged transcripts (txt files) and 3. audio files (mp3
files). Orthographic and POS-tagged transcripts are available for all of the
121 interviews. Of the 139 recordings, 127 can be accessed online. All
transcripts and audio files are anonymised. FRED-S offers a rich resource for
research into phonetic-phonological and morphosyntactic variation across the
dialects spoken in the British Isles. 

The interactive FRED database (https://fred.ub.uni-freiburg.de/) provides a
first overview of the FRED-S data. Texts can be searched for words and sorted
by social parameters of the speakers such as age, gender and dialect area. 

For more fine-grained searches in FRED-S, the AntConc emulation can be used
(https://freidok.uni-freiburg.de/data/10845). With this emulation, AntConc can
be opened in the browser without installing it on your computer. 

What are the next steps?

FRED online is an ongoing project. We are currently working on aligning texts
and audio files with PRAAT to facilitate more in-depth analyses of
phonetic-phonological variation. We are planning to provide access to the
aligned transcripts by spring 2018. Furthermore, it is our goal to make the
whole FRED corpus available online by mid-2017. After anonymising the
remaining interviews and clarifying last copyright issues, we will publish
them online step by step. Also, the FRED website will be continuously updated
and improved. For example, we are planning to provide more options for
downloading specific bundles of files.

If you have any suggestions and ideas for further improving FRED online,
please let us know: fred at anglistik.uni-freiburg.de. Thank you very much!

Linguistic Field(s): Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)

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