Spoken Corpora of Slavic Languages

Abstract

Spoken corpora are collections of transcribed and annotated audio and /or video recordings of languages or language varieties. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of 51 spoken corpora currently available for Slavic languages and dialects, in particular Belarusian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Trasianka, Ukrainian/Rusyn. We identify three groups of corpora according to the type of lect: corpora of standard languages (spoken mainly in an urban environment and existing in both written and oral form), dialects (spoken mainly in a rural environment and unwritten), and bilingual varieties (we call bilingual varieties spoken as L2 by people with different L1 languages, as well as all varieties that evolved in a multilingual environment). We survey the corpora in terms of text registers, transcription, and principles of linguistic and extralinguistic annotation. In conclusion, we suggest a list of features that linguists should take into consideration when developing a spoken corpus. Many spoken corpora are currently being created for various Slavic lects, and their developers may use this overview as a source of information on different designs and solutions.