The Young Appalachians' Living Language (YALL) Corpus

Jennifer Cramer and Mark Richard Lauersdorf

This project will build a monitor corpus of Appalachian language data featuring audio-aligned transcripts of original audio/video interviews with young people from across Appalachia. The project is designed not only to provide a large collection of much needed sociolinguistic data from the Appalachian dialect region for linguistic research purposes, but also to provide a representation of Appalachian speech to the interested public through a website designed for community outreach and education. The project also seeks to establish a set of standards and best practices for the development of a richly-annotated monitor corpus for sociolinguistic analysis of spoken language; and the tools developed for both the construction and presentation of this corpus will be designed for wide application in other projects dealing with variation in spoken language.