A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME, Version 3.2 — Upgraded 2024)
LAEME was compiled by Margaret Laing (University of Edinburgh), with an introduction by the author and Roger Lass (University of Cape Town) and web-scripts by Keith Williamson, Vasilis Karaiskos (University of Edinburgh) and Sherrylyn Branchaw (University of California, LA). The latest front-end was developed by Vasilis Karaiskos.
LAEME is based on the principles of mediaeval dialectology developed for A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (AUP/Mercat Press, 1986; LALME). However, LAEME goes beyond LALME in that it is founded on the methodology of corpus linguistics. Complete texts (or large samples of very long texts) have been diplomatically transcribed from original manuscripts or facsimiles. Each word and each derivational and inflectional morpheme in the text is lexico-grammatically tagged. The LAEME Corpus of Tagged Texts (CTT) consists of ca 650,000 words tagged at a high level of detail, enabling investigations at all linguistic levels. The full list of texts, can be found here.
The LAEME texts were originally organised as tagged texts and dictionary files, and have now been recompiled as TEI-compatible XML documents, which can be downloaded or viewed as HTML pages. The text metadata, as well as the tagged data can be searched across a number of specific parameters using the bespoke search tool. This will provide the output as exportable tables, as well as allowing users to create concordances between different linguistic elements across texts. The corpus can also be searched via our mapping tool, which allows users to produce custom downloadable maps visualising the distribution of lexical, grammatical and spelling features. The tool also includes almost 2000 pre-determined maps, based on a number of previously-researched or dialectologically interesting features contained in the Atlas. The site also provides a detailed bibliography of relevant work by the main compiler for the resource: Meg Laing.
For an overview of LAEME see the websites’ Front Page. For specific guidance on how to use the corpus tools, please read the ‘How to Search‘ page. A full explication of the principles that underly LAEME may be found in the resources’ original Introduction. Also, an illustration of useful ways to compare and contrast the maps of early Middle English data in LAEME with those of late Middle English data in eLALME has been provided by Margaret Laing in this document. Be aware that in the introduction and mapping documents there will be references to the legacy version of LAEME, but the overall logic for transcription, tagging and working on Early Middle English dialectology still stand.
The compilation of LAEME was funded by a number of grants and institutions. The project received a 5-year grant from The Leverhulme Trust (1993-1998), a one-year British Academy grant (1999) and two AHRB/AHRC grants: numbers AN5021/APN11064 (for period 2000-2003) and AN10105/APN16240 (for period 2003-2006). Work on the Atlas also had important help from The University of Edinburgh, The University of Cape Town, Dr. Carol Dolinskas and Professor Ryuta Murakami.
The legacy web interface for LAEME (before 2024) is still available here. A guide to the resource, by Rhona Alcorn, should help you navigate the original LAEME interface (you can download it here).
