The Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of American Spoken English (LANA-CASE) is the first large-scale, freely available corpus of everyday, private American English conversation. The corpus contains approximately 10 million tokens (1,031 hours) of conversation across 1,477 texts, featuring 1,225 speakers from across the United States. The conversations were collected between 2022 and 2024.
LANA-CASE provides a rich resource for research and teaching, enabling users to explore the language of everyday American conversation, including patterns of word and phrase use, communicative practices and variation across speakers and contexts. The corpus includes detailed information about both the situational characteristics of the texts and the demographic characteristics of its speakers, together with transcription conventions and metadata.
Release date: 16 September 2026
LANA-CASE will be available for use through #LancsBox X and for direct download. Users must agree to the LANA-CASE license agreement before accessing the corpus.
Find out more about LANA-CASE.
The LANA-CASE User License
Please read through the license below. If you are willing to agree to its terms, complete the form that follows to get access.
The Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of American Spoken English (LANA-CASE) User License
Preamble
The Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of American Spoken English (LANA-CASE) is a publicly-accessible resource. This means that anyone may obtain a copy and use it for non-commercial research. However, the materials contained within the corpus are not in the public domain. The copyright is owned by Lancaster University and Northern Arizona University.
Use of LANA-CASE without registering and submitting a request via this form is forbidden. By registering and submitting this form you are entering into a license with Lancaster University and Northern Arizona University. In using LANA-CASE you are bound by the following terms and conditions.
Terms used in this license
- The Corpus: the Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of American Spoken English (LANA-CASE), including (a) the texts of the Corpus, (b) any modified versions of this Corpus supplied alongside those texts, and (c) all supplementary documentation and other material supplied alongside those texts.
- We/Us: Lancaster University and Northern Arizona University, acting on our own behalf as copyright holders in the material contained within the Corpus.
- You: the signatory of this license, to whom permission to access and use the Corpus is granted.
- You may sign this license either as an individual, or as a representative of an institution. In cases where different conditions apply to individual and institutional signatories, this is stated explicitly below: “If you are an individual signatory…” / “If you are an institutional signatory…”
General use of the Corpus
- You may make use of the Corpus only: (a) for purposes of non-commercial research, or (b) for purposes of teaching.
- You must NOT use the Corpus for the purposes of training artificial intelligence.
- You must NOT upload transcripts to any artificial intelligence software or website which collects and/or saves data.
- You must at all times respect the privacy of speakers in the texts of the Corpus. In particular, you must not attempt to undo or bypass any of the anonymization in any of the texts in the Corpus.
- If you are an individual signatory, you must ensure that your use of the Corpus, or use of the Corpus by other persons through any interface created or maintained by you, adheres to the terms of this license. We will be held blameless for any disputes arising about unauthorized use.
- If you are an institutional signatory, you must ensure that use of the Corpus by any person affiliated to your institution, or who gains access to the Corpus through an interface created or maintained by your institution, adheres to the terms of this license. We will be held blameless for any disputes arising about unauthorized use.
Publication of research
- You may publish the results of research that uses the Corpus.
- In any such publication, you may reproduce excerpts of the texts of the Corpus only as permitted under copyright law and “fair dealing”. You must clearly identify any such excerpt as originating from the Corpus and as owned by Lancaster University and Northern Arizona University.
- In any such publication, you must acknowledge the use of the Corpus in your research, by citing the following standard reference (in your field’s usual referencing style):
Hanks, E., McEnery, T., Egbert, J., Larsson, T., Holmberg, A. J., Biber, D., Reppen, R., Baker, P., Bottini, R., Brezina, V., Brookes, G., & Clarke, I. (2026). Introducing the Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of American Spoken English (LANA-CASE). Corpora.
Reproduction and modification of the Corpus
- If you are an individual signatory, you may make an unlimited number of copies of the Corpus for your personal use only.
- If you are an institutional signatory, you may make an unlimited number of copies of the Corpus for use by people affiliated with your institution (that is: employees and, if you are an educational institution, students). Likewise, you may copy the Corpus to a shared drive or network location within your institution, so long as this location can only be accessed by people affiliated with your institution.
- You must not redistribute the Corpus. This means that you must not transfer, or allow to be transferred, any copy (in part or full) of the Corpus or a modified version of the Corpus, to any other person or institution.
- You must not allow any other person or institution to access or use the Corpus, except under the conditions outlined below for online interfaces.
- You must store all your copies of the Corpus on computer equipment that you own and is under your direct control. In particular, you must not store any copy of the Corpus on any external “Cloud” Internet service.
- You may re-encode, reformat, annotate, and/or modify the Corpus in any way, and make use of, and/or make copies of, such a modified version of the Corpus in any of the ways that this license permits.
- You must not pass copies of any such modified version of the Corpus, or any part of such a modified version, to any other person or institution (if you are an institutional signatory: to any person not affiliated with your institution as defined above).
- If you wish to allow others to obtain a copy of such a modified version of the Corpus, you may submit the modified version to us for distribution alongside the original Corpus.
- We reserve the right to accept or reject any such submission. If we accept such a submission, we reserve the right to distribute the modified version under a license with more restrictive terms than those outlined here.
- You hereby agree that any intellectual property that you hold in a modified version of the Corpus, that is submitted to us and that we accept, shall be assigned to Lancaster University and Northern Arizona University.
Use in online interfaces
- You may allow others to make use of your copy of the Corpus, or any modified version, via an online interface.
- You must ensure that any such online interface allows the Corpus to be used only in accordance with this license. In particular:
- You must provide us, on request, with access to any such online interface.
- You must provide us, on request, with full details in writing of how access to the corpus data in any such online interface is monitored and controlled in accordance with the conditions above.
Commercial use of the Corpus
- You must not make use of the Corpus for any commercial or profit-making purpose under this license.
- You may apply separately to us in writing for permission to make commercial use of the Corpus under a commercial license.
- We reserve the right to refuse such requests, or to grant them subject to payment and/or subject to a license with more restrictive terms than those outlined here.
Other conditions of use
- You hereby acknowledge that the Corpus data is provided to you “as is”, without any warranty, without even the implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose.
- You hereby agree that we will not be liable to you for loss of profits, goodwill or any kind of consequential losses of any nature arising from your use of the Corpus, even if such loss was foreseeable.
Termination of the license
- We may terminate this license at any point, by giving you notice in writing. You must erase all copies of the Corpus in your possession upon receipt of such notice.
- You may terminate this license at any point, by erasing all copies of the Corpus in your possession.