Many congratulations to our colleagues at Lancaster’s Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), one of the HL2C founding institutes, for the official launch of the British National Corpus 2014.

The British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014, website) is a large collection of samples of contemporary British English language use, gathered from a range of real-life contexts. The BNC2014 contains millions of words of spoken and written English and is an exciting new resource for research and teaching on contemporary British English.

The BNC2014 is being gathered by Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press. It is the successor to the original British National Corpus, which was gathered in the early 1990s. By comparing the two corpora, researchers will be able to shed light on how British English may have changed over the last two decades. The BNC2014 is now available together with its predecessor the BNC1994 via #LancBox X.

The written BNC was official launched on November 19, 2021. Please see below for a short summary on the launch event. For more information on the BNC2014, please the CASS website or contact Dr Vaclav Brezina.

Celebrating the Written BNC2014: Lancaster Castle event

On 19 November 2021, The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) organised an event to celebrate the launch of the Written British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2024). The event was live-streamed from a very special location: the medieval Lancaster Castle.  There were about 20 participants on the site and more than 1,200 participants joined the event online.  Dr Vaclav Brezina started the event and welcomed the participants from over 30 different countries. After the official welcome by Professor Elena Semino and Professor Paul Connolly, a series of invited talks were delivered by prominent speakers from the UK and abroad. The talks covered topics such as corpus development, corpora in the classroom, corpora and fiction and the historical development of English.

Please visit the CASS website for more information on the event, including slides.