A Corpus of Santome

Abstract

We present the process of constructing a corpus of spoken and written material for Santome, a Portuguese-related creole language spoken on the island of S. Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea (Africa). Since the language lacks an official status, we faced the typical difficulties, such as language variation, lack of standard spelling, lack of basic language instruments, and only a limited data set. The corpus comprises data from the second half of the 19th century until the present. For the corpus compilation we followed corpus linguistics standards and used UTF-8 character encoding and XML to encode meta information. We discuss how we normalized all material to one spelling, how we dealt with cases of language variation, and what type of meta data is used. We also present a POS-tag set developed for the Santome language that will be used to annotate the data with linguistic information.