Establishing a Language by Annotating a Corpus

Abstract

In this paper, we show that building a treebank can be used as a way to establish a language. Annotated corpus can be used as tools when arguing that some linguistic data belongs to a separate language (rather than a dialect or variety of another established language). We provide here a case study on a treebank of Naija, a Post-creole spoken in Nigeria which presents us with significant differences from treebanks of English in terms of existing constructions and frequency of several syntactic units.