Mono- and multilingualism in a specialized corpus of New Zealand Stories

In this paper, we provide insight into the compilation of a specialized small corpus that gathers short oral narratives by New Zealanders with different linguistic repertoires. The corpus is designed to explore internal variation in New Zealand English dependent on the monolingual vs. multilingual background of its speakers. This is different from the scope of corpora in World Englishes (e.g. the ICE corpora) and in New Zealand English (Wellington written and spoken corpora), which were compiled to give a representative sample of their target varieties. By contrast, the corpus of New Zealand Stories is a specialized collection of spoken language which is aimed at allowing an internal comparison of the language data according to the linguistic repertoire and the ethnicity of the speakers. In order to create comparative data sets, the oral narratives were elicited from 140 university students performing the same narrative task. The participants were assigned to four target groups comprising Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand European) monolingual and multilingual speakers. The paper will describe the making of the corpus including data collection and transcription of the oral narratives. Particular emphasis will be put on the internal division of participants in mono- and multilingual speakers and on issues of coding contact features from Māori in the English narrations. Since many of the bilingual Māori-English speakers can also be considered bicultural participants, it is an interesting question whether and how to code instances of culturally specific Māori concepts in the individual stories. In addition, a range of research questions will be outlined that can be tackled with the specialized corpus of New Zealand Stories.