Overview

The LangAge corpus is a longitudinal corpus (2005–2023).

It is comprised of narrative biographical interviews with older speakers of French (mostly over the age of 70), centered in the city of Orléans. The first interview series of 2005 has been expanded to a longitudinal project spanning over 10 years, resulting in over 940 000 tokens of transcribed and aligned text and audio data. In addition to the audio-recordings of biographical interviews, the LangAge corpus includes written materials such as essays and personal letters, as well as recordings of group conversations and reminiscing sessions in nursing homes and adult education institutions.

A dedicated database has been created, which permits in-depth linguistic analysis and annotation on different levels such as syntax, morphology, lexicon, pragmatics, and prosody. Thanks to the open source software LaBB-CAT, our database can now be managed, analysed
and published according to high-quality standards as well as shared following the FAIR-Principles.

The longitudinal setting of corpus data allows for expanding linguistic analyses in the burgeoning field of linguistic lifespan studies, where the later decades of life are rarely covered in their own right (see research and outreach). Hence the LangAge corpus facilitates the study of the evolution of language use in later life over time and in a broad range of situations!