BILinMID: A Spanish-English Corpus of the US Midwest

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 5511–5516 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 5511 BILinMID: A Spanish-English Corpus of the US Midwest Irati Hurtado Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 707 S Mathews Ave., 4142 FLB, 61801 Urbana, IL, USA ihurta3@illinois.edu Abstract This paper describes the Bilinguals in the Midwest (BILinMID) Corpus, a comparable text corpus of the Spanish and English spoken in the US Midwest by various types of bilinguals. Unlike other areas within the US where language contact has been widely documented (e.g., the Southwest), Spanish-English bilingualism in the Midwest has been understudied despite an increase in its Hispanic population. The BILinMID Corpus contains short stories narrated in Spanish and in English by 72 speakers representing different types of bilinguals: early simultaneous bilinguals, early sequential bilinguals, and late second language learners. All stories have been transcribed and annotated using various natural language processing tools. Additionally, a user interface has also been created to facilitate searching for specific patterns in the corpus as well as to filter out results according to specified criteria. Guidelines and procedures followed to create the corpus and the user interface are described in detail in the paper. The corpus is fully available online and it might be particularly interesting for researchers working on language variation and contact. Keywords: Bilingualism, Language contact, Bilingual corpora 1. Introduction The Hispanic population in the United States makes up to 15-20% of the nation’s total population currently, and it is expected to continue growing in the next few decades (Pew Research Center, 2008). Due to its proximity to the US-Mexico border, Hispanics have more presence in the Southwest of the country (US Census, 2015), a situation that has inspired numerous studies on language contact and bilingualism in that area (e.g., Silva-Corvalán, 1994; Teschner, 2009; Travis et al., 2017). The predominance of the Southwest is also reflected in the few available corpora that document Spanish-English bilingualism in the United States (Gironzetti, 2021, 2022), which leave other US areas underrepresented in those datasets. The Bilinguals in the Midwest (BILinMID) Corpus1 constitutes an attempt to document the Spanish and English spoken in an area that has not received much attention in the literature but where the presence of Hispanics is certainly considerable, especially in recent years (Potowski, 2020). The creation of a text corpus such as BILinMID has important implications. On the one hand, the corpus serves as a pedagogical resource, since it can make learners value local language varieties and view them as a relevant source of learning. This is especially important in the case of Spanish, as US varieties of this language are often stigmatized (Hill, 1998). On the other hand, because the Midwest has a smaller bilingual population than other US regions, the corpus allows researchers interested in language contact, variation, and acquisition to better understand how the degree of societal bilingualism influences linguistic phenomena. For example, researchers could compare data from …

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