Corpus of American Danish (CoAmDa)

Our corpus of heritage Danish, Corpus of American Danish (CoAmDa), is based at the LANCHART-Center at the University of Copenhagen. It is part of the LANCHART-center’s corpus and the LANCHART corpus infrastructure. The CoAmDa-recordings are transcribed in Transcriber and linked with the sound file in Praat. As of February 2017, CoAmDa contains 180 hours of speech by 311 speakers which amounts to approximately 1.5 million words. The corpus is marked for language.

Corpus of North American Danish

The North American subcorpus (Corpus of North American Danish, CoNAmDa) contains approx. 80 hours of recordings of 230 speakers. These data are legacy data which we have inherited from other researchers and research projects:

  • Associate professor Iver Kjær (University of Copenhagen) and professor Mogens Baumann Larsens (University of Aalborg) recorded Danish speaking emigrants and their descendants all over the US (179 persons) and Canada (23 persons) from the early 1960’s to the 1980’s. 194 speakers of this dataset are now part of CoNAmDa.
  • Professor Tore Kristiansen (University of Copenhagen) recorded 40 persons in Solvang, California, in the early 1990’s. Of these, 12 speakers are now part of CoNAmDa. 
  • Professor emeritus Christopher Hale (University of Alberta) recorded 24 Danish speaking people in New Denmark, New Brunswick, Canada, in the late 1990’s. All of these recordings are now part of the CoNAmDa.

These North American recordings represent speakers born between 1870 and 1941, both emigrants from Denmark and their American born or Canadian born descendants. The original recordings were made on reel-to-reel tapes or audio cassettes. In order to preserve the data, the recordings have been digitized (read about the digitization and contact us if you are interested in us digitizing your own data).

Corpus of South American Danish

The Argentine data have been collected by participants of ‘Danish Voices in the Americas’, Jan Heegård, Karoline Kühl, PhD student Anna Sofie Hartling and consultant Jon Albris  in 2014 and 2015. Read more about the settlement patterns of the Argentina Danes and the field work sites. The subcorpus, Corpus of South American Danish (CoSAmDa) consists of approx. 100 hours of recording of 81 speakers born between 1911 and 1971.