Towards a historical corpus of Canadian English letters and diaries

The paper reports on the compilation and illustrates the main features of a corpus of manuscript ego documents written in English by both adults and children in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in Canada – a crucial time in the history of the country and in the development of the Canadian variety of English. The corpus is part of a larger project that intends to contribute to Canadian studies and English historical sociolinguistics by a) tracing the evolution of the specificities of Canadian English in a diachronic perspective; b) investigating the contribution of different languages or varieties of the same language to the development of Canadian English; and c) analyzing how demographic and social differences are encoded in and have influenced language use in Canada. Some preliminary findings are also presented.