Sydney Speaks Corpus

A compilation of three sub-corpora of Australian English, made up of sociolinguistic interviews and oral histories. Recordings are from a total of 260 speakers, born from the 1890s to the 1990s, recorded in the 1970s~1980s and 2010s~2020s. The sub-corpora include the Bicentennial Oral History Project (with speakers born around 1900, and recorded in 1988); the Sydney Social Dialect Survey (with speakers born in the 1930s and 1960s, and recorded in 1977-1981; cf. Horvath 1985); and Sydney Speaks 2010s (with speakers born in the 1960s and 1990s, and recorded from 2014 to the present). All participants are native speakers of Australian English, and come from diverse ethnic backgrounds, currently Anglo-Celtic, Chinese, Greek and Italian (and this is under expansion). The sample is further stratified according to sex and social class. Approximately 5,000 words per speaker have been transcribed, for a total of some 1.5 million 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 both information about the times the participants have lived through, and allows for social contextualisation of the linguistic patterns observed.本数据集为一套包含三个澳大利亚英语子语料库的合集，素材均取自社会语言学访谈与口述历史。录音总计覆盖260名受访者，其出生年代跨度为1890年至1990年，录音工作分别开展于1970至1980年代、2010至2020年代。三个子语料库具体包括：百年纪念口述历史项目（Bicentennial Oral History Project），受访对象出生于1900年前后，录音于1988年完成；悉尼社会方言调查（Sydney Social Dialect Survey），受访对象出生于1930年代与1960年代，录音周期为1977至1981年（参见Horvath 1985）；以及2010年代悉尼语料库（Sydney Speaks 2010s），受访对象出生于1960年代与1990年代，录音工作自2014年起持续至今。所有受访者均为澳大利亚英语母语使用者，族群背景多元，当前涵盖盎格鲁-凯尔特裔、华裔、希腊裔与意大利裔（样本仍在扩展中）。样本进一步按性别与社会阶层进行分层。每位受访者的访谈素材均转录约5000词，总转录字数约达150万词。正字法转录文本（包含韵律信息）已在话语层面完成时间对齐，并通过强制对齐（force alignment）实现了音段层面的时间匹配，使得该数据集可适用于多维度的语言学分析。录音中蕴含的社会历史信息，既可为受访者的生活时代背景提供详实佐证，也可为所观测到的语言模式提供社会语境层面的阐释依据。