Sociolinguistic Extension of the ORD Corpus of Russian Everyday Speech

Abstract

The ORD corpus is one of the largest resources of contemporary spoken Russian. By 2014, its collection numbered about 400 h of recordings made by a group of 40 respondents (20 men and 20 women, of different ages and professions), who volunteered to spend a whole day with a switched-on voice recorder, recording all their verbal communication. The corpus presents the unique linguistic material recorded in natural communicative situations, allowing spoken Russian and the everyday discourse to be studied in many aspects. However, the original sample of respondents was not sufficient enough to study a sociolinguistic variation of speech. Thus, it was decided to launch a large project aiming at the ORD sociolinguistic extension, which was supported by the Russian Science Foundation. The paper describes the general principles for the sociolinguistic extension of the corpus. It defines social groups which should be presented in the corpus in adequate numbers, sets criteria for selecting participants, describes the “recorder’s kit” for the respondents and involves the adaptation principles of the ORD annotation and structure. Now, the ORD collection exceeds 1200 h of recordings, presenting speech of 127 respondents and hundreds of their interlocutors. 2450 macro episodes of everyday spoken communication have been already annotated, and the speech transcripts add up to 1 mln words.