The Boarnsterhim Corpus

The Boarnsterhim Corpus is a corpus of spoken language, consisting of 250 hours of speech in both West Frisian and Dutch by the same sample of bilingual speakers. The corpus contains original recordings from 1982-1984 and a replication study recorded 35 years later. At both recording moments, three members of a single family, either male or female, were recorded who represent different generations. This results in a unique data collection which spans speech of four generations and combines panel and trend data. In terms of apparent language change, the Boarnsterhim Corpus provide samples of a hundred years of language change.
The data can be used for a wide range of language variation and change studies, including socio-phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, dialectology, and pragmatics in monolingual and bilingual context. The data are also interesting for historiographic studies, code-switching in balanced bilinguals, and developments in reading skills in minority-majority language contact.