The Strathy Corpus of Canadian English is now online! You can access the corpus at https://www.english-corpora.org/ where it is hosted by Brigham Young University, alongside other English corpora including the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC). Researchers who would like to obtain a full digital copy of the corpus in order to use their own software should contact the unit directly.
What is the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English?
The first director of the Strathy Language Unit, W.C. Lougheed, was determined that the unit's research on Canadian English have a strong descriptive base. To that end, and with great technological foresight, he began to build a corpus of Canadian English, a planned sample of authentic language, in the early 1980s, stored as an electronic database. The original organizational scheme was based on the Brown-LOB Corpora.
Today the Strathy Corpus contains around 50 million words of written and spoken Canadian English, covering the years 1970-2010. It includes newspapers, magazines, biographies, historical writings, academic theses and journals, transcripts of university classes, Internet news and so on. Canadian authors who have generously allowed their fictional and nonfictional texts to be entered into the database include Margaret Atwood, Max Braithwaite, J.K. Chambers, Robertson Davies, Eugene Forsey and Makeda Silvera. Publishers who have made use of the Strathy Corpus in creating Canadian English dictionaries include Oxford University Press, Thomson-Nelson (formerly Gage) and HarperCollins.