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This website offers free access to the Bolton/Worktown corpus, a corpus of conversations among working-class people which took place in Bolton, an industrial town in the North of England, in the late 1930s.  The corpus is drawn from the Worktown papers of the Mass-Observation Archive (see Web Resources page) where written records of these conversations can be found. It provides, I argue, an unorthodox, but unique and rich source of data for researchers with an interest in spoken corpora, historical linguistics and historical sociolinguistics.  While it is primarily a resource for linguists, there is also material of interest for social historians as the data reveals much about social attitudes at the time, including reaction to events in the build-up to the Second World War and the early stages of the war.  It has taken me around 10 years (on and off) to collect the spoken data from the Worktown papers of the Mass-Observation Archive. I hope you will find the end result as stimulating and enjoyable as I found the process.  Please note that all the photos on this website are copyright Bolton library and reproduced with their kind permission; the spoken data is  reproduced under Creative Commons Licence by kind permission of Mass Observation (www.massobs.org).

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