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This corpus study focuses on collecting linguistic data in the state of Massachusetts and publishing it for future research purposes. With more than 70 validated speakers (aged 18-25) from various regions of Massachusetts, this corpus aims to be a “linguistic snapshot” of current linguistic variation within the state. This corpus also bridges a gap in the current literature to better comprehend the linguistic patterns of racial minorities and historically under-represented regions of Massachusetts, which represent ~33% and ~25% of the current corpus, respectively. Participants were recruited through Prolific and their linguistic and demographic data was collected through LinQ, an app currently in development. The survey included spontaneous audio-response questions about their opinion of their community, curated readings to elicit well-known linguistic variables in the region, and questions about certain related social factors, among other variables. Their responses will be uploaded to Scholarworks, an online archive maintained by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Given the wide range of data collected on each participant, linguists interested in variation in this region will find something within this published data set that supports their research interests-- including, but not limited to, sociophonetic, prosodic, and morphosyntactic variation.

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