How Software Features and Linguistic Analyses Add Value to Orthographic Markup in Transcription of Multilingual Recordings for Digital Archives

This report discusses the importance of accounting for language contact and discourse circumstance in orthographic transcriptions of multilingual recordings of spoken language for deposit in digital language archives (DLAs). Our account provides a linguistically informed approach to the multilingual representation of spontaneous speech patterns, taking steps toward documenting ancestral and emergent codes. Our findings lead to portable lessons learned including (a) the conclusion that transcriptions can benefit from a bottom-up approach targeting particular linguistic features of sociocultural relevance to the community documented and (b) the implication (for researchers developing transcriptions for other DLAs) that the principled implementation of particular software features in tandem with systematic linguistic analysis can be helpful in finding and classifying such features, especially in multilingual recordings.