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Helsinki Archive of Regional English Speech – Cambridgeshire Sampler

HARES-CAM

http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HARES/

HARES is a collection of audio-recorded interviews that were gathered in England in the 1970s and 1980s. The fieldworkers were Finnish graduate and post-graduate students from the University of Helsinki, who shared a common interest in the study of dialect syntax. The informants were elderly persons who had lived in the region all their lives and who had left school at an early age. HARES combines the digital audio files with orthographic transcriptions and XML-annotated metadata.

The Cambridgeshire sampler contains 20 interviews recorded in 15 villages. The interviewees are 'typical' HARES informants, in that they are elderly (the youngest is in his 60s and the oldest in his late 90s), non-mobile (the informants have been born and bred in the area, with little or no time spent away), minimally educated (having left school at an early age) and rural (with professions such as horsekeeper, farmer and housewife). The sampler represents a 'modern' trend in dialectological surveys, because some of the interviews have women as primary informants.