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Guide to free eresources

Access a list of free eresources selected by our experts, including websites, full text databases, abstracting and indexing databases and other reference sources

Sociolinguistics

British National Corpus (BNC) 

100 million word corpus of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written. 

Cornish Story 

Stories and films collected by the Cornish Audio Visual Archive combined with articles relating to all aspects of Cornish culture in the past and present. 

Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse 

Collection of Middle English texts assembled from works contributed by University of Michigan faculty and from texts provided by the Oxford Text Archive, as well as works created specifically for the Corpus. 

Dialect and Heritage 

Website of Leeds University project featuring digitised content from the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture including material relating to the Survey of English Dialects. 

Dictionaries of the Scots Language 

Electronic editions of the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language: the 12-volume Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST)and the 10-volume Scottish National Dictionary (SND). 

Digital Education Research Archive 

A digital archive of documents published electronically by government and related bodies in the area of education. 

Endangered Languages Documentation Project (ELDP) 

Web hub for information on language endangerment, with access to resources on language documentation, archives and research projects. 

Endangered Languages Project (ELP) 

A project to support language preservation and documentation around the world. 

English Dialect Dictionary 

Digital version of Joseph Wright's 19th century dictionary, the most comprehensive dictionary of English dialects ever published. 

Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects (FRED) 

Corpus of British Regional English designed for the analysis of morpho-syntactic variation. 

Geiriadur-ar-lein (Welsh-English English-Welsh Online Dictionary) 

Online Welsh-English English-Welsh dictionary provided by the University of Lampeter. 

Green's Dictionary of Slang 

Digital version of Jonathon Green's dictionary, the largest historical dictionary of English slang. 

Middle English Dictionary 

Electronic version of the 15,000 page print MED offering an enormous database of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500. 

Open Languages Archives Community 

Worldwide virtual library of language resources. 

Rosetta Project 

Global collaboration of language specialist and native speakers building a publicly accessible online archive of all the world 

Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) 

Corpus of Scottish texts from 1945 to the present day. 

The IViE CORPUS (English Intonation in the British Isles) 

Recordings of nine urban dialects of English spoken in the British Isles. 

The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE) 

Corpus of dialect speech from Tyneside in North-East England. 

The Speech Accent Archive 

Speech samples from native and non-native speakers of English with phonetic transcriptions. 

The Speech Ark 

Corpus of British regional speech, suitable for training and evaluating speech technology systems or for phonetic study and analysis. 

Urban Dictionary 

Online slang dictionary with definitions provided by contributors.