Sociolinguistic coverage
The speakers
One feature of oral history interviews which is a crucial prerequisite for investigating dialects in their most original form is that the speakers spent most of their life in one specific geographic area and feel a strong bond with that area.
FRED-S samples 144 speakers who all grew up in Britain (some speakers were interviewed more than once and some interviews have more than one speaker, hence the discrepancy between the total number of speakers and texts). Most of the speakers were born before World War I and were aged 60 or over at the time of the interview (the oldest speaker was born in 1877; almost 90% of all speakers were born before 1920). About 70% of the textual material in FRED-S was produced by the 60+ age group. A breakdown of the amount of text produced by the different age groups is presented in table 7, a breakdown according to date of birth in table 8.
Table 7. Speaker distribution and text production by age group, FRED-S.
age group |
number of speakers
|
running words |
% of textual material
|
0 - 44 years |
4 |
12,287 |
1.2% |
45 - 59 years |
5 |
40,258 |
4.0% |
60+ years |
71 |
726,134 |
71.8% |
age unknown |
64 |
232,558 |
23.0% |
Table 8. Speaker distribution and text production by birth decade, FRED-S.
decade of birth |
number of speakers
|
running words |
% of textual material
|
1870 - 1879 |
1 |
6,899 |
0.7% |
1880 - 1889 |
5 |
89,615 |
8.9% |
1890 - 1899 |
28 |
260,909 |
25.8% |
1900 - 1909 |
30 |
281,068 |
27.8% |
1910 - 1919 |
21 |
176,507 |
17.5% |
1920 - 1929 |
7 |
74,365 |
7.4% |
1930 - 1939 |
3 |
23,494 |
2.3% |
1940 - 1949 |
1 |
1,684 |
0.2% |
unknown |
48 |
96,696 |
9.5% |
More than two thirds of the speakers are so-called NORMs, i.e. non-mobile old rural males, who typically left school at age fourteen or younger. The ratio of running text produced by male speakers to running text produced by female speakers is roughly 74:26, with 87 male and 52 female informants in total. A breakdown by speaker sex of the textual material in the corpus is shown in table 6.
Table 6. Speaker distribution and text production by speaker sex, FRED-S.
|
number of speakers
|
% of speakers
|
running words |
% of textual material
|
male |
87 |
60.4% |
742,873 |
73.5% |
female |
52 |
36.1% |
267,966 |
26.5% |
sex unknown |
5 |
3.5% |
398 |
0.0% |
The speakers of each conversation are shown in table 4, and the sociological information for each individual, like date of birth, age at the time of the interview, sex, etc. are available in table 5.
Note that the stories told in the corpus are private in nature, which is why the research group took care to anonymise all FRED-S transcripts. All person and family names were replaced by names of corresponding length and syllable structure. Different tags were used for female and male first names and nicknames, initials and surnames (names of objects, companies, brands, etc. remain unchanged).
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