Our goal is to represent language that's spoken in the United States. To do this, we're collecting conversation recordings of thousands of people from different regions, ethnicities, ages, and backgrounds. That's where you come in! When you participate, your voice becomes part of a valuable resource for research on language and English language teaching. 

Thanks to everyone who has participated, data collection ended on October 15, 2024. We will continue to post updates about the project on this website as well as on our social media:

Twitter/X (@LANA_corpus)

TikTok (@lana_linguistics)

Instagram (@lana_linguistics)

Facebook (LANA Linguistics)

YouTube (@LANA_linguistics)

This project encompasses the design and compilation of the Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of American Spoken English (LANA-CASE). LANA-CASE is the American English counterpart to the widely used British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014) in that it consists of large amounts of anonymized, transcribed, and freely available spoken language samples. 

The project is led by a team of applied linguistics researchers from Lancaster University (Tony McEnery, Vaclav Brezina, Paul Baker, Gavin Brookes, Isobelle Clarke, and Raffaella Bottini) and Northern Arizona University (Jesse Egbert, Tove Larsson, Lizzy Hanks, Doug Biber, and Randi Reppen), and it is made possible through the generous support of Lancaster University's Global Advancement Fund.

By compiling LANA-CASE, we aim to provide language researchers not with financial gain but rather with increased opportunities to conduct meaningful research that can improve language teaching, policy, and understanding. We anticipate that, similar to the BNC, LANA-CASE will be used to research various phenomena (such as word and phrase frequency, communicative purpose, and social justice issues). LANA-CASE is also accompanied by the Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of American Written English (LANA-CAWE), which will be used for similar purposes. 

Your support is vital to the success of this project. Please consider participating today, submitting your email to receive updates, and/or following us on Twitter (@LANA_corpus), TikTok (@lana_linguistics), Instagram (@lana_linguistics), Facebook (LANA Linguistics), or YouTube (@LANA_linguistics).

This project is made possible through the generous support of the following organizations and grants:

Lancaster University's Global Advancement Fund

Northern Arizona University's Faculty Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience Development Grant

Northern Arizona University's Corpus Research Lab

Northern Arizona University's SGS Award