Corpora of Mobile Speakers (CorMS)
When a person grows up in one dialect region, and later moves to another, which features of the new dialect do they adopt, and what factors influence the likelihood of dialect change? Examining the process of second dialect acquisition (SDA) by mobile individuals can shed light both on the linguistic system undergoing change and the social context in which that change is embedded. The Corpora of Mobile Speakers (CorMS) aims to facilitate SDA research by providing a place where scholars interested in this topic can share their data and benefit from the data collection of others.
CorMS currently houses recordings of 59 speakers of North American English who grew up in one dialect region and later moved to another. These include 31 natives of Toronto, Canada who had been living in New York City, United States at time of recording, and 28 natives of New York City who had been living in Toronto. An orthographic transcript accompanies each audio file.
We hope to expand CorMS to include recordings and transcripts representing speakers of other languages and dialects with different mobility histories. If you are a researcher interested in linking your own mobile speaker data to CorMs, please contact Dr. Jen Nycz.
CorMS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (4.0) International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ ). It is available for free for noncommercial use. To obtain access to the corpora, please register here.
This website was made possible by support from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1651108) and Georgetown University.
Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or Georgetown University.