Originally conceived of as a complex digital object comprising audio clips from field dialect recordings coordinated with text files containing analysis on several levels, the Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition project is now being prepared as an interactive database. The central focus remains the collection of interviews, each of which is available both as an audio file and in text format. The texts are currently being transcribed, translated, annotated, and entered into the database. When data entry is completed, tags at both the token level (for linguistic features) and the text level (for discourse and content features) will allow users to extract and compare data on many more levels than has previously been possible.

The database comprises 172 audio clips, excerpted from recordings made by the authors in 66 different Bulgarian villages over the last quarter century. All recordings are of speech in natural conversational settings, and each excerpt is chosen with both form and content in mind. In the first instance, the excerpt illustrates the most salient linguistic features of the particular dialect, and in the second instance, the excerpt is a well-formed piece of discourse communicating some aspect of village life or of the speaker’s worldview. Wherever possible, excerpts have also been chosen which illustrate methods of field dialectology.

A project by Digital Humanities at Berkeley.