ABSTRACT
The Bergen Corpus of London Teenager Language (COLT) was launched in March 1993 with support from the Norwegian Research Council for the Humanities. It consists of about half a million words of spontaneous conversations between 13- to 17-year-old boys and girls from London with varying social backgrounds, ranging from lower working class to upper class. The method used for recording the data was patterned on the Longman model used for collecting the British National Corpus (BNC) (described in Crowdy, Chapter 19). The entire corpus was transcribed by the Longman Group and was ready for checking by the Bergen team in March 1994. The corrected version was then included as part of • the BNC (for further processing of the BNC see, e.g. Quirk 1992: 460–1). At the Bergen end, the transcription will be refined to suit our purposes, and COLT will ultimately be available on CD-ROM, with text, sound and search program.
