MetaLing Corpus Project

Our project studies the English metalanguage that was created to analyse and compare, appraise and classify, teach and learn the vernacular languages of Europe between 1500 and 1700, i.e. before the development of comparative philology and the institutionalisation of linguistics as an academic discipline. Our method for corpus collection combines human and computational tools to analyse available sources and make an inventory of authors and works representative of early modern linguistic metalanguage in English.

Project leader: Angela Andreani, University of Milan
Time of compilation: 2024–
Size: c. 1,000 words (metadata records only)
Language: Early Modern English
Number of texts/samples: c. 30
Period: 1573–1699
Released: 2025
Funding: The project is funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, PRIN project call 2022 – “MetaLing Corpus: Creating a corpus of English linguistics metalanguage from the 16th to the 18th century”, ref.: 202233C93X, funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU, PNRR Mission 4 - Component 2 - Investment 1.1.
Project home page: https://www.uninsubria.eu/node/575, https://expertise.unimi.it/resource/project/PRIN202223AANDR_01

Reference line and copyright

The MetaLing Corpus (2025). Compiled at the Universities of Milan and Insubria by Angela Andreani and Daniel Russo.

Rights holder of the source texts: Oxford Text Archive.

Manual

Andreani, Angela, and Daniel Russo. 2026. “Work Data 1 - Metaling Corpus.” UNIMI Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.13130/RD_UNIMI/KS2PUX

Compilers

Angela Andreani, Daniel Russo.

Availability

The metadata corpus is available through CSV files and a web interface, open access.

Technical information

The corpus contains metadata records only. It does not include the full text of the documents. For more information, see the basic structure of the corpus.

CoRD Entry submitted on January 20, 2026 by Miriam Cuscito.
Information for the entry was edited by Daniel Russo.