Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. 2023. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer sofwatre]. Version 6.3.20, retrieved 24 October 2023 from http://www.praat.org/

ELAN (Version 6.6) [Computer software]. 2023. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive. Retrieved from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan

Nycz, Jennifer. 2015. Second Dialect Acquisition: A Sociophonetic Perspective. Language and Linguistics Compass 9/11: 469–482.

Ortega, Lourdes. 2009. Understanding Second Language Acquisition. London: Routledge.

Siegel, J. 2010. Second Dialect Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

When someone moves to a region where a different language is spoken, the influence is often clear: that person learns a new language, or at least enough of the new language to be understood. A vast literature on Second Language Acquisition examines how people take up new languages as well as the linguistic and social details of this process. (Ortega 2009). What about when someone moves to a place where they speak the same language, but a different dialect of that language? A much smaller body of research on Second Dialect Acquisition (SDA) suggests that people do adopt some (though not all) features of that new dialect, depending on a complex set of development, linguistic, and social-attitudinal factors (Siegel 2010, Nycz 2015). A significant obstacle to the study of SDA is the relative lack of large, accessible corpora of language data from mobile people who share a movement history: any researcher interested in this topic must first undergo the time- and resource-intensive process of recruiting their own participants, collecting data and processing that data before any analysis can take place. Those who have done the fieldwork and amassed the recordings may not be able to carry out every possible analysis of that data, limited by time, interest, or their own expertise; students or early-career researchers with an SDA research question but (as yet) no data of their own may be stymied before they can even start. The Corpora of Mobile Speakers (CorMS) aims to facilitate SDA research by providing a place where scholars interested in this topic can increase the impact of their own data and benefit from the data collection of others.

CorMS currently houses recordings of 59 mobile speakers of North American English: these include 31 natives of Toronto, Canada living in New York City at time of recording, United States, and 28 natives of New York City living in Toronto. A key goal of CorMS is to make data as accessible as possible across different platforms and users. Accordingly, all audio, transcript, and metadata files associated with the site use non-proprietary formats (such as wav, csv) or those which can be easily opened in free software (ELAN, Praat) and converted to other formats.

Our proposed multimedia presentation will introduce the CorMS website and corpora to build awareness of this resource for immediate research and teaching applications. As CoRMS will be readily accessible via its website, the presentation will consist of a laptop open to the site for browsing, a poster providing site stills and explanatory text for larger groups of viewers, and the presence of the CorMS PI who can give the project "elevator pitch" and answer questions. We hope to expand CorMS to include recordings and transcripts representing speakers and signers of other languages and dialects with different mobility histories, and believe ICLaVE participants will be a great audience of potential contributors to (and users of) the corpora.