GerManC. A historical corpus of German 1650-1800 (University of Manchester)

"The ultimate aim of the project is to compile a representative historical corpus of written German for the years 1650-1800. This is a crucial period in the development of the language, as the modern standard was formed during it, and competing regional norms were finally eliminated. The structure of this corpus will parallel that of similar historical linguistic corpora of English, such as the ARCHER corpus or the Helsinki corpus, and one of the goals will be to provide a basis for comparative studies of the development of the grammar and vocabulary of the two languages and the way in which they were standardized. Following these models and given the aim of representativeness, the complete GerManC corpus is projected to contain 2000 word samples from eight registers: drama, newspapers, sermons and personal letters (to represent orally-oriented registers) and narrative prose (fiction and biographies), academic, medical and legal texts (to represent more print-oriented registers)."