The Old Bailey Corpus is a sociolinguistically, pragmatically and textually annotated corpus based on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. These speech-related texts document Late Modern English as used in London’s Central Criminal Court. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey were published from 1674 to 1913 and constitute a large body of Late Modern English texts. The 2163 volumes contain almost 200,000 trials, totalling ca. 134 million words. Since the proceedings were taken down in shorthand by scribes in the courtroom, the verbatim passages are arguably as near as we can get to the spoken word of the period. The material thus offers the rare opportunity of analyzing spoken language in a period that has been neglected both with regard to the compilation of primary linguistic data and the description of the structure, variability, and change of English.

2019