The Corpus of New York City English (CUNY-CoNYCE) aims to further the study of New York City English (namely, the varieties of English particular to New York City and the surrounding region), through the development and use of an innovative audio-aligned and parsed corpus of New Yorkers’ speech. The project combined recent advances in speech corpus development tools with the special talents and backgrounds of CUNY undergraduates to create a database that is a resource for researchers in all areas of linguistics.

Current State: Version 1.0 contains 196 New York City English speakers and contains about 2-million words including sound files and time aligned textgrids. See the Project Description page for demographic details on the participants.

We will be (slowly but continuously) updating by adding new speakers mainly through untranscribed interviews but also through new interviews. Version 2.0 will include a part-of-speech tagged and parsed version of the transcripts which will be searchable online using structural queries. That version will not be available for a few years. 

Publication: As August 26, 2025: An audio-aligned version of the corpus became accessible on Kratylos.

Access: Please fill out this User Agreement if you wish to use the corpus.

Citation: Please use this citation link for how to cite this version of the corpus.

 

Project PIs:

• Christina Tortora, City University of New York (College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center)
• Cecelia Cutler, City University of New York (Lehman College and The Graduate Center)
• Bill Haddican, City University of New York (Queens College and The Graduate Center)
• Michael Newman, City University of New York (Queens College and The Graduate Center)
• Beatrice Santorini, University of Pennsylvania

Research Associates and Assistants:

• C.E.A. Diertani, PhD, University of Pennsylvania; formerly at City University of New York, The Graduate Center, as CoNYCE project manager and Research Associate
• Leyla Eldridge, MA student, City University of New York, The Graduate Center, CoNYCE Research Assistant
• Kovid Pal-Odouard, NYU, Research Associate and Project Organizer

Please explore the links above for further information on this project.