Private Correspondence Corpus

The Private Correspondence Corpus (KSK) provides the possibility to look into the language of contemporary private epistolary texts. The KSK, capturing handwritten correspondence, possibly in the last stage of its existence, contains electronic transcriptions of 2000 letters (that is 942 573 corpus positions) from 1990–2004. The selection of texts complies with the condition of a variety of idiolects, that is, it represents the language of 2000 different people. In the collected correspondence, there are writers from the entire Czech Republic, of all age and education categories, however thecommunication of young people is most accentuated as it is the best evidence of the contemporary development tendencies of Czech, transformations of the correspondence genre and written expression in general.

All collected correspondence texts are appended with essential sociological characteristics of the writers and addressees, in particular with information about the gender (male – female), age (4 age groups) and education (2 levels). The above mentioned parameters are compatible with the language material processing in the corpora of spoken Czech (PMK, BMK), which are also part of the Czech National Corpus. A new feature is represented in the reflection of the territorial dialect background of the letter writers, which is recorded through place data and a number, which classifies the place in the dialect areas determined according to The Czech Language Atlas (1993). Each document also contains the characteristics of the relation between the writer and the addressee (4 possibilities) and information about the year it was written and its form.

— Zdeňka Hladká (project leader)