Mapping Diatopic and Diachronic Variation in Spoken Czech: The ORTOFON and DIALEKT Corpora

Abstract

ORTOFON and DIALEKT are two corpora of spoken Czech (recordings + transcripts) which are currently being built at the Institute of the Czech National Corpus. The first one (ORTOFON) continues the tradition of the CNC’s ORAL series of spoken corpora by focusing on collecting recordings of unscripted informal spoken interactions (“prototypically spoken texts”), but also provides new features, most notably an annotation scheme with multiple tiers per speaker, including orthographic and phonetic transcripts and allowing for a more precise treatment of overlapping speech. Rich speaker- and situation-related metadata are also collected for possible use as factors in sociolinguistic analyses. One of the stated goals is to make the data in the corpus balanced with respect to a subset of these. The second project, DIALEKT, consists in annotating (in a way partially compatible with the ORTOFON corpus) and providing electronic access to historical (1960s–80s) dialect recordings, mainly of a monological nature, from all over the Czech Republic. The goal is to integrate both corpora into one map-based browsing interface, allowing an intuitive and informative spatial visualization of query results or dialect feature maps, confrontation with isoglosses previously established through the effort of dialectologists etc.

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