These coding guidelines apply to the LCDC corpus of sociolinguistic interviews, but they can potentially be adapted to annotate other transcribed sociolinguistic interviews. The Language and Communication in Washington, DC project is a collection of recordings of interviews with longtime DC residents about life in the city. This corpus is used by variationist sociolinguists at Georgetown and elsewhere to analyze social variation and diachronic change in the dialects spoken in DC. In addition to Standard English and the Mid-Atlantic regional dialect, the corpus also contains interviews with speakers of African American English. African American English, in addition to phonological differences from Standard English, importantly also includes variable use of morphosyntactic features and structures that are not available to speakers of General American English. For this reason, any annotation schema that attempts to apply to such a variable corpus must be able to handle both the non-standard forms and structures and the variation between these non-standard forms and the standard both within a single speaker and across speakers.
=====