A Spoken Corpus of Inhabitants of Polish Spisz

Abstract

The article describes a dialect corpus project that documents the dialect of Polish Spisz. In contrast to the majority of dialectological research in Poland, our corpus also includes the speech of the youngest and middle generations, as its aim is also to document the sociolinguistic situation of the dialect of the region. Recordings have been transcribed into standard Polish orthography, not phonetically, which makes it possible not only to easily search the corpus but also to use existing tools to lemmatize and add morphosyntactic annotation to the texts. Users interested in the phonetic layer can access the recordings on a per-utterance basis. The article describes the stages of compiling the corpus and discusses its potential applications. The authors argue that a large corpus which covers a small, homogeneous area is a more valuable resource for dialectologists than a series of small corpora documenting a larger region.