A corpus of spoken Faroese

Abstract

The paper describes the new Corpus of Spoken Faroese. While the corpus is still under development with respect to content (number of informants, dialects and words), it is included in the larger Nordic Dialect Corpus, which means that all technical solutions are already in place. As a result, the Faroese corpus is fully operable, albeit with a rather limited number of words at present. The recordings have all been made, but transcription and tagging remain undone for most of them, however these are expected to be finished by the end of 2009. At the moment, there are nine conversations in the corpus. In the paper I describe some of the search and result-handling options the corpus offers, exemplifying with Faroese, and I also try to shed light on some linguistic questions using the corpus.