The International Corpus of English: Malta & Puerto Rico

Research

Bamberg Survey of Language Variation and Change (BSLVC)

Research

A digital database of lexical and grammatical preferences of speakers from various varieties of English

The Department of English Linguistics is working towards establishing a digital database for comparative studies on lexical and grammatical preferences in various English varieties across the globe. The BSLVC project was initiated in 2008 with a focus on Romance-English language contact. Its scope has since widened to other sites where English is used as a first language (ENL), including England, Wales, Scotland, Australia, Puerto Rico and the US, and to regions where English is spoken as a second language (ESL, e.g. Malta, Gibraltar, Puerto Rico) and as a foreign language (i.e. EFL varieties, including Germany, Slovenia and Sweden).

As of October 2022, we have collected 5,134 questionnaires, resulting in approximately 350,000 lexical data points and around 200,000 grammatical data points. As a substantial amount of social, regional and educational information on our questionnaire participants is still underexplored (despite Krug et al. 2016 or Krug & Sönning 2017, listed below), we would be more than happy to engage in conversations and co-operations aiming to fruitfully explore these.

Bamberg Team

  • Manfred Krug (PI), Veronika Kilian, Katharina Scheiner, Lukas Sönning, Fabian Vetter (Department of English Linguistics)

Partners

  • Mari Jones, University of Cambridge
  • Monika Kavalir, University of Ljubljana
  • Lucía Loureiro-Porto, Universitat de les Illes Balears
  • Ole Schützler, Universität Leipzig
  • Elena Seoane, Universidade de Vigo
  • Don E. Walicek, University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras

Funding

Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Bildung und Kultus, Wissenschaft und Kunst; European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)

Publications

  • Krug, Manfred & Anna Rosen. 2012. Standards of English in Malta and the Channel Islands. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Standards of English, 117–138. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139023832.007.
  • Krug, Manfred, Ole Schützler & Valentin Werner. 2016. Patterns of linguistic globalization: Integrating typological profiles and questionnaire data. In Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja & Sarah Chevalier (eds.), New approaches to English linguistics: building bridges (Studies in Language Companion Series 177), 35–66. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.177.03kru.
  • Krug, Manfred, Ole Schützler & Valentin Werner. 2020. How British is Gibraltar English? In Paloma Núñez-Pertejo, María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya & Javier Pérez-Guerra (eds.), Crossing Linguistic Boundaries: Systemic, Synchronic and Diachronic Variation in English, 153–186. London: Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350053885.
  • Krug, Manfred & Katrin Sell. 2013. Designing and conducting interviews and questionnaires. In Manfred Krug & Julia Schlüter (eds.), Research methods in language variation and change, 69–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511792519.
  • Krug, Manfred & Lukas Sönning. 2018. Language Change in Maltese English: The Influence of Age and Parental Languages. In Patrizia Paggio & Albert Gatt (eds.), The languages of Malta (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 18), 247–270. Berlin: Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1181801.
  • Sönning, Lukas, Manfred Krug, Fabian Vetter, Paul Messer, Anne Leucht & Timo Schmid. To appear. Latent-variable modeling of ordinal outcomes in language data analysis.