Resources

Talebanken is an archive for audio files primarily related to Norwegian speech, and a corpus of audio files linked with transcriptions. A catalog of the audio archive can be found here (link to PDF document).

The Talebanken corpus has been technically developed by Uni Research Computing with the aim of streamlining analyses and making them more secure. The material in the corpus has been compiled in connection with previous sociolinguistic speech studies. The intention is that the material, including codings, should be reusable in new projects.

Both the audio archive and the corpus have been established for research purposes, and access is therefore limited to researchers with permission. Interested parties can contact Ragnhild Lie Anderson.

Målføresamlinga is a archive of speech material from various parts of the country, primarily from Western Norway.

Målføresamlinga at UiB dates back to the Folklore Collection at Bergen Museum, which was founded by Professor Torleiv Hannaas in 1921. It primarily contains material from Western Norway, namely the four counties of Rogaland, Hordaland, Sogn og Fjordane, and Møre og Romsdal. The collection has been continually updated since its start, but the type of material has changed with technological development. While the early collections largely consisted of handwritten records of various kinds, today it mainly includes digitized and transcribed audio recordings that are added to the archive.

Today, the collection comprises approximately 10,000 pages of information and dialect analyses; it contains word collections totaling 428,000 words, and the audio recordings amount to around 2,000 hours from the early 1950s to the present.

Much of the material has been collected through systematic collection projects, both those organized by the Dialect Collection and those conducted by master's students and doctoral candidates in connection with their dissertation work. In recent years, a significant amount of material has been collected from two NFR-funded projects: Dialektendringsprosessar (link to project page) and the Industristadprosjektet (link to project page)

From January 1, 2014, the archive on behalf of LLE is responsible for UiB's contribution to the NFR-funded project Language Infrastructure made Accessible (LIA), which aims to build a research resource that makes all speech resources in Norway accessible within a structured framework.

LIA (Language Infrastructure made Accessible) is a five-year national collaboration project between four universities (UiO, UiB, UiT, and NTNU), the Norwegian Dictionary, and the National Library of Norway. The main goal of the project is to preserve old audio recordings of Norwegian and Sami languages, transcribe and annotate them, and incorporate them into databases so that they can be revitalized as valuable research material. The project management is based at the Text Laboratory at the University of Oslo. Here you can find the project's website (external link).