Archive of Spoken Galician

Development of the Archive of Spoken Galician or Arquivo do Galego Oral (AGO) began in 1974, its aim being the creation of a corpus for multidisciplinary study of spoken Galician while contributing to a better knowledge of Galician society through samples of its non-material heritage. The Archive contains around two thousand hours of interviews with sound recordings of over 8000 people, over a thousand hours of which (obtained between 1992 and the present) are recordings of about 6,000 informants from every municipal area in Galicia, plus essentially Galician-speaking places in Asturias, Leon and Zamora and all three such in Caceres).

In the short term, AGO aims to put on-line a text bank making up a thematic atlas of the spoken language throughout the Galician language domain, and to build a search engine as an aid for research on variation, linguistic change and linguistic geography. A selection of texts (with audio recordings and semi-phonological, standardized transcriptions) covering a variety of topics of historical, ethnographic or sociocultural relevance can be seen at http://ilg.usc.gal/ago/.