ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how corpora of general and special language can be used to create language resources easily and efficiently. It identifies ways and means of studying and promoting languages spoken by a numerically small community of people. Welsh, a lesser-used language, is regarded by many as the everyday language of particular and well-defined communities and has an extensive textual heritage, dominated by literary and religious texts. The advent of machine-readable text corpora on networked computers will help to free authors and readers from the tyranny of paper-based methods of information dissemination. The use of corpora and native-speaker assessment may have been motivated in English by its international nature, its status as the language of science and technology, its position as the main language of the United Nations and the European Union, and its dominant position as the language used in international litigation and patent law.
