The British National Corpus 2014 is a major project led by Lancaster University to create a 100 million word corpus (a large collection of ‘real life’ language) of modern-day British English. This corpus will be used by researchers to understand more about how language works and how it is evolving. Educators, dictionary compilers and the interested public will also be able to access the corpus to find usage examples of modern British English in different genres.

Currently, the first stage of the project has been completed with the Spoken BNC2014 released via Lancaster’s CQPweb. The second stage involves creating a written counterpart to the Spoken BNC: the Written BNC2014 (see below)

The Written BNC

The Written BNC2014 will be a new version of the written section of the original British National Corpus, which is now over 20 years old. The corpus will allow for diachronic comparisons with the original BNC (BNC1994), whilst being representative of current British English. We are collecting samples from fiction, academic journals, newspapers, magazines, blogs and more.

Team: Vaclav Brezina, Carmen Dayrell, Mathew Gillings, Abi Hawtin, Tony McEnery and Matt Timperley

Contact: a.hawtin@lancaster.ac.uk, v.brezina@lancaster.ac.uk

Would you like to contribute to the Written BNC2014?

• Book collection [Already submitted] [British authors] [Instructions]
• Student essay collection (school-level or university-level essays)
• Email collection (anonymised) [Instructions]
• SMS collection (anonymised) [WhatsApp Instructions] [FB Instructions]
• Tweet collection (anonymised) [Instructions]

How to get access?

• BNC2014 Spoken

1. Register for free and log on to CQPweb.
2. Sign-up for access to the BNC2014 Spoken.
3. Select ‘BNC2014’ in the main CQPweb menu.

• BNC1994 (original British National Corpus)

1. Register for free and log on to CQPweb.
2. Select ‘British National Corpus (XML edition)’ in the main CQPweb menu.