ENPC background and history

Comparison of languages is of great interest both from a theoretical and from an applied perspective. It reveals what is general and what is language-specific and is therefore important both for the understanding of language in general and for the study of the individual languages compared. The analysis has applications within lexicography, language teaching, and translation studies.

The ENPC project started out as a research project at the Department of British and American Studies, University of Oslo, in 1994. The corpus was completed in 1997. In the period from 1997 to date the corpus has been extended to include more languages (German, Dutch, Portuguese, French) – and has resulted in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus.

The manual was completed in 1999 and revised in 2002.