WIEC

The Wolfe Island English Corpus (WIEC) is a collection of approximately 100 interviews with residents of Wolfe Island, Ontario. The interviews were conducted between 2011 and 2015 by a project team at the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in conjunction with the Wolfe Island Historical Society. The aim of the project was to collect oral histories by Island residents for the study of language and local history.

Acknowledgements

WIEC would not have been possible without the support and participation of members of the Wolfe Island Historical Society. Special thanks to Brian MacDonald for his invaluable assistance with all aspects of this project, from locating participants to conducting interviews to coordinating travel. Thank you to Theresa Broeders, Hank Connell and Teilhard Frost for generously helping with interviews. Finally, thank you to all of the participants who warmly welcomed the project team into their homes and shared their stories and memories.

At the Strathy Language Unit, many students and staff members worked on aspects of this project over the years. Special thanks to Tabitha Daly and Kathryn Rochon for managing different phrases of the project as well as conducting and transcribing interviews, and to Bonnie Hall for significant work on the transcriptions and editing as well as for being instrumental in identifying terms and quotations for this online lexicon. Thank you to all of the others who contributed in some way to the creation of WIEC: Jodi Basch, Rebecca Cuthbert, Noor Ferdous, Anna Frenkel, Jake Garofolo, Emily Ho, Beth Houze, Madison Lawson, Liselle Sambury, Roos Schut, Ankita Seal and Anna Seltner.

The initial phase of the WIEC project was supported by a grant from the Senate Advisory Research Committee at Queen’s University to Strathy Language Unit Director, Anastasia Riehl.