Mira Načeva-Marvanová (J. E. Purkyně University)

Electronic Corpora of Slavic Micro-languages at Their Threshold –the State of the Art and its Further Prospects

After the fall of the iron curtain, since the middle of the 1990s, new written and spoken
language digital corpora have been developed for almost all of thestandard
Slavicliterarylanguages.
Oneshouldadd
that
this
quite appropriate, useful, and above all, extremely beneficial approach is the best
method of language documentation of micro-languages as well. It has also been applied
to a certain extent to some other sociolinguistic varieties of language.
This presentation is focused on the already available current Slavic micro-language
corpora, such as: (1) the two monolingual "large size" written text corpora of Upper
Sorbian – HOTKO (of 32 million words) and of Lower Sorbian – DOTKO (of 12million words) - both these corpora are hosted by the Czech National Corpus using its
corpus managers and interface; (2) the series of five oral digital multimedia corpora of:Burgenland Croatian, colloquial Upper Sorbian, Molise Slavic (Na-našu) in SouthernItaly, Nashta (Liti, Northern Greece) and the language of Edesa (Northern Greece,called by its researcher Bulgaro-Macedonian) – all these corpora are a part of theFrench-German research Euroslav 2010 and LaCiTo (France); (3) the WORTSCHATZ
corpora of Kashubian, Lower Sorbian, Upper Sorbian, Silesian andTranscarpathian Rusyn (a project of the University of Leipzig); (4)thedigitalarchiveofLower
SorbianlanguagedataattheDoBeS (Documentation Bedrohter Sprachen = Documentation of EndangeredLanguages); (5) the Transdanubian electronic corpus of Bulgarian dialects (from 38locations) in Southern Romania (of the University of Calgary and University of Sofia).
This presentation analyzes the options of the presented corpora, according to theirtype (corpora of written or spoken language; corpora of literary or non-literary, regionallanguage; monolingual or multilingual corpora) and according to applied linguistictechnologies. Not of less importance is the selection and the extent of the corpora
attributes, sorting options, parsing and levels of annotation, transcription solutions (e.g.
in oral corpora), meta-lingual information, options for collocation and statisticalanalyses. The application of most of these attributes enables and facilitates the further

use of Slavic micro-language corpora for linguistic, sociolinguistic, common culturaland educational purposes.
We can claim that the corpus building of Slavic micro-languages, though in its
infancy, is already a reality. One can expect, in the conditions of the current digitalworld, that the methods for documentation of Slavic micro-languages will proceed inthisdirection.
No
doubtEUsocialpolitics
andthesocialenvironment stimulates and supports this approach. However, considering the strategyof the Slavic corpus linguistics and its achievements up to now, it seems appropriate tosuggest that it is at least equally important for most of the Slavic micro-languages toseek and find the will to establish mutual internal, as well as trans-borderand international, understanding and cooperation. One can only ask whether the creationand funding of the Lithuanian-Latvian-Latgalian corpora project (within the LatviaLithuania Cross-Border Cooperation Programme 2007-2013) should not be aninspiration.