A Corpus of German and English Weather Forecasts from 2025/2026

<strong>A Corpus of German and English Weather Forecasts from 2025 to 2026</strong>

In this research project, we compiled a corpus of German and English weather forecasts, containing forecasts from 2025 to 2026. The weather forecasts have been collected from nine websites over a period of nine months (starting on 11 July 2025 and running up until 31 March 2026). Four of these websites are hosted in the UK, providing weather forecasts on the UK and Europe, with another five websites hosted in Germany and therefore providing weather forecasts either (and most frequently) on different regions across Germany or on Europe. Overall, the size of the British English component of the corpus amounts to 794,396 tokens and the German one to 756,393 tokens.

Since the English and German parts of the corpus are directly comparable in terms of a) size (see above) b) genre (weather forecasts) and c) time  (2025-2026), the corpus allows for a series of structural comparisons across the two Germanic languages. Given that English meteorological predicates boast a series of non-agentive subjects –  i.e. subjects which denote a time or a location, as in <em>Sunday will be dry</em> or <em>London will be rainy</em>, – this corpus provides a sound quantitative basis for comparing the subject-forming possibilities of English and German (going back to  Rohdenburg 1974).

The corpus can be searched with AntConc. The files are available as plain txt files and as tagged files, using either upos or xpos tagging. Additionally, parsed versions of the texts are available, utilizing the CoNLL-U format. We are happy to grant researchers and interested students access to the corpus upon request.

This project was funded by the <strong>Hamburgische Wissenschaftliche Stiftung, </strong>Antrag 07/25, Kontrastive Linguistik interdisziplinär gedacht: die Erstellung eines digitalen Wetterkorpus zum Deutschen und Englischen.

References:

Berlage, Eva and Marcel Frömberg. 2026. <em>A Corpus of German and English Weather Forecasts from 2025/2026</em>. Universität Hamburg.

Rohdenburg, Günter (1974). <em>Sekundäre Subjektivierungen im Englischen und Deutschen</em>. Bielefeld: Corneslen-Velhagen &amp;Klasing.