The Sydney Speaks Lifespan Corpus

A longitudinal corpus of Australian English, made up of 20 sociolinguistic interviews from a total of five Greek-background and five Italian-background Australians born in the 1960s and recorded in 1977-1981 and 2019. The participants are native speakers of Australian English whose parents migrated from Greece or Italy. Speakers were first recorded as teenage participants in the Sydney Social Dialect Survey (cf. Horvath 1985), and again as middle-aged adults in 2019 as part of Sydney Speaks. Approximately 30 minutes of speech per speaker have been transcribed, for a total of some 86, 000 words. Orthographic transcriptions (including prosodic information) are time aligned at the level of the utterance, and have been force aligned to the level of the segment, making the data ideal for linguistic analysis at a range of levels. The socio-historical information in the recordings provides information about the times the participants have lived through, and their changing relationships to Australian society and their own ethnic identities.