LUDViC

Language Unity and Diversity: Variation in Caboverdean and beyond

The LUDVIC project explores the core notions of unity and diversity in human language through the adequate description and theoretical explanation of variation phenomena in Caboverdean. This is not yet an official language in its own country, Cabo Verde, thus keeping a state of unequal interaction with Portuguese, the language of the former colonizers. Besides this permanent contact, different varieties are spoken in the various islands of the archipelago, in a situation of abundant diversity that is largely understudied.

These variation phenomena are in the process of being collected during semi-informal interviews (with some details checked in grammatical judgement sessions), most of them recorded in Cabo Verde, but also some in the United States (Massachusetts and Rhode Island), an extension that aims to address the linguistic effects of the contact of Caboverdean with English.

This new digital, open access corpus results from these interviews, semi-orthographically transcribed into XML files with a TEI (Text Encoding Initiative).