Why create the corpora?

When someone moves to a region where a different language is spoken (from New York to Nice, for example, or from Berlin to Bangkok), the influence is often clear: that person learns a new language, or at least enough of the new language to be understood. A vast literature on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) examines how people take up new languages as well as the linguistic and social details of this process.

What about when someone moves to a place where they speak the same language, but a different dialect of that language – from New York to Toronto, or from Montreal to Paris? A much smaller body of research on Second Dialect Acquisition (SDA) suggests that people do adopt some (though not all) features of that new dialect, depending on a complex set of development, linguistic, and social-attitudinal factors*. A significant obstacle to the study of SDA is the relative lack of large, accessible corpora of speech data from mobile speakers who share a movement history: any researcher interested in this topic must first undergo the time- and resource-intensive process of recruiting their own participants, conducting their own data collection and processing that data to some extent before any analysis can take place. Those who have done the fieldwork and amassed the recordings may not be able to carry out every possible analysis of that data, limited by time, interest, or their own expertise; students or early-career researchers with an SDA research question but (as yet) no data of their own may be stymied before they can even start.

The long-term goal of CorMS is to advance the study of SDA by hosting a repository of high-quality, shareable corpora of data collected from people who have had contact with other dialects as a result of mobility. Scholars who share their recordings and transcripts will increase the (citable!) impact of their fieldwork labor, while those who do not have the time or resources to devote to extensive fieldwork (graduate students with a semester to write a qualifying paper, for example) can still examine questions about SDA.

*See Siegel 2010 or Nycz 2015 for more detailed discussion of these points