Database puts the accent on Yorkshire dialect
Posted on 25 February 2008
The database contains dozens of interviews with Yorkshire men and women, talking about their lives and their experiences growing up in York.
The new corpus will let [students] study language change and structure in Yorkshire
Dr Bill Haddican
The vast collection was originally gathered in the late 1990s by Dr Sali Tagliamonte, then a York-based lecturer. The process of digitising the material has now been completed, and in all more than 90 hours of recorded speech is now available for study by students and academics.
Drawing on the newly digitised data, students will discover how English dialects vary from one speaker to the next, both within Yorkshire and further afield.
Using specialist software, students will learn to measure different aspects of linguistic production and to analyse their findings quantitatively. This kind of analysis is crucial in fields such as speech language pathology and forensic linguistics.
Dr Bill Haddican, a lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science, said: "Many of our students are from Yorkshire and surrounding areas. The new corpus will let them study language change and structure in Yorkshire - a dialect in which many already have a keen interest."
Similar digital resources are already available at the University of York for other regional dialects, including London, Newcastle and Derby.
ENDS
Notes to editors:
- The Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York is one of the leading centres in the UK for teaching and research in theoretical and empirical linguistics. Its major specialisms are in syntax and semantics, phonetics and phonology, language variation and change, and psycholinguistics. The Department, which has 350 undergraduate and postgraduate students and 23 full-time staff, is also committed to high quality language teaching.