Folk Speech in Russian National Corpus

The number of online information resources on Russian dialectology increases every year. There are dialect dictionaries, interactive dialect maps, speech recordings available on the Internet. This article examines the Corpus of Dialect Texts, a part of the of the Russian National Corpus. Launched in 2005, the Corpus of Dialect Text continually expands to include any Russian dialect texts recorded either in the original area of residense of Russian population or in territories that where settled and migrated to at a later point in time. The corpus includes fi eld recordings, audio and video transcripts, texts from anthologies and compilations, and its collection continues to grow. Presently, the web-site http://www.ruscorpora.ru/search-dialect.html provides free access to texts recorded in 25 areas of Russia. The article pre sents samples from the Corpus of Dialect Texts spe ci fying the “passport” data of each record, provides details on methatextual and grammatical annotation of texts and describes search functions of the corpus. One of the primary tasks of the dialect subcorpus has to do with collection of new records and further growth of the Bank of dialect texts. The V. V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute eagerly seeks to enrich the dialect subsorpus with texts from diverse sources from various regions of Russia and other countries in order to create a representative database readily available to anyone who appreciate the folk word — both linguists and nonlinguists.