Visualizing spoken corpus data on a map is an invaluable tool both at the stage of data collection (keeping track of numbers of speakers from different regions for corpus balancing purposes) and data exploration (examining the regional distribution of a sociolinguistic variable). Recently, a tool in this vein has been made available to Czech National Corpus users via the SyD application: a map summarizing the proportional usage of a given set of variants across the traditional dialect regions of Czech represented in the ORAL series corpora. The advantages of this new feature are discussed and examples highlighting how it can give an intuitive overview of dialectal variation are given. Current and future plans for other useful types of map-based visualizations of spoken corpus data are also presented.
The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the structure and contents of the soon-to-be available ORAL corpus, which combines previously published corpora (ORAL2006, ORAL2008 and ORAL2013) with newly transcribed material into a single conveniently accessible and more richly annotated resource, about 6 million running words in length. The recordings and corresponding transcripts span a decade between 2002 and 2011; most of them capture interactions of mutually well-acquainted speakers, in informal situations and natural settings. The corpus is complemented by amarginal portion of more formal data, mostly public talks. It is tagged and lemmatized, and an effort was made to adapt existing tools (targeted at written language) to yield better results on spoken data. We hope the availability of such a resource will spawn further discussions on the morphological and syntactic analysis of spoken language, perhaps resulting in more radical departures in the future from the part-of-speech classification inherited from the linguistic analysis of written language.
LANGUAGES IN MIGRATION is designed as a representation of authentic spoken Czech and German that is used in informal speech (private environment, spontaneity, unpreparedness etc.) by Czech-German bilingual speakers born in Czechoslovakia around 1955 and who departed for Germany after becoming 12 years old. The corpus is composed of interviews conducted from 2018–2020 with 20 speakers on language biographies and narrated in Czech and German respectively. 10 interviews were recorded with late (German) repatriates and 10 with Czech migrants. The corpus includes transcripts of ca. 14 hours of Czech recordings and ca. 13,5 hours of German recordings. It contains 217 650 orthographic words (i.e. a total of 286 533 tokens including punctuation). Metadata of LANGUAGES IN MIGRATION include basic sociolinguistically relevant speaker categories (gender, year of birth and of migration, level of education and region of childhood and present residence).
The transcription of LANGUAGES IN MIGRATION is linked to the corresponding audio track. The transcription was carried out on the orthographic tier and supplemented by an additional metalanguage tier. The corpus LANGUAGES IN MIGRATION is lemmatized and morphologically tagged in different formats for Czech and German (Stuttgart-Tübingen-Tagset). Deviations from the norm of the spoken Czech and German of the homeland, which are understood as the result of language contact and language isolation, are tagged in a further tier both in the Czech and in the German sub-corpuses of LANGUAGES IN MIGRATION. The (anonymized) corpus is provided in form of transcripts in EAF format, which can be viewed via the freely available ELAN program, and a (semi-XML) vertical format used as an input to the Manatee query engine. The data thus correspond to the corpus available via the KonText query engine to registered users of the CNC at http://www.korpus.cz
ORTOFON v1 is designed as a representation of authentic spoken Czech used in informal situations (private environment, spontaneity, unpreparedness etc.) in the area of the whole Czech Republic. The corpus is composed of 332 recordings from 2012–2017 and contains 1 014 786 orthographic words (i.e. a total of 1 236 508 tokens including punctuation); a total of 624 different speakers appear in the probes. ORTOFON v1 is fully balanced regarding the basic sociolinguistic speaker categories (gender, age group, level of education and region of childhood residence).
The transcription is linked to the corresponding audio track. Unlike the ORAL-series corpora, the transcription was carried out on two main tiers, orthographic and phonetic, supplemented by an additional metalanguage tier. ORTOFON v1 is lemmatized and morphologically tagged. The (anonymized) transcriptions are provided in the XML Elan Annotation format, audio (with corresponding anonymization beeps) is in uncompressed 16-bit PCM WAV, mono, 16 kHz format.
Another format option of the transcriptions is also available under less restrictive CC BY-NC-SA license at http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-2580
ORTOFON v1 is designed as a representation of authentic spoken Czech used in informal situations (private environment, spontaneity, unpreparedness etc.) in the area of the whole Czech Republic. The corpus is composed of 332 recordings from 2012–2017 and contains 1 014 786 orthographic words (i.e. a total of 1 236 508 tokens including punctuation); a total of 624 different speakers appear in the probes. ORTOFON v1 is fully balanced regarding the basic sociolinguistic speaker categories (gender, age group, level of education and region of childhood residence).
The transcription is linked to the corresponding audio track. Unlike the ORAL-series corpora, the transcription was carried out on two main tiers, orthographic and phonetic, supplemented by an additional metalanguage tier. ORTOFON v1 is lemmatized and morphologically tagged. The (anonymized) corpus is provided in a (semi-XML) vertical format used as an input to the Manatee query engine. The data thus correspond to the corpus available via the KonText query engine to registered users of the CNC at http://www.korpus.cz
Please note: this item includes only the transcriptions, audio (and the transcripts in their original format) is available under more restrictive non-CC license at http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-2579