North Markian Corpus

This page provides a corpus of North Markian and Central Pomeranian (German Nordmärkisch-Mittelpommersches Korpus, NMK), consisting of copyright-free literary works to represent the primary regions and varieties of the dialect.

North Markian is a dialect of Low German spoken in the federal states of Sachsen-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Germany. For modern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the historical region of Hither Pomerania in modern Poland, the dialect is referred to as Central Pomeranian, but differences between North Markian proper and Central Pomeranian are marginal. In modern Poland, the dialect is extict, in Germany, it is severely threatened.

Since July 2024, the Low German language is protected by state law in the federal state of Brandenburg, but political decisions and educational resources to protect and support the language should be made in accordance with an understanding of the characteristics of the language that is to be protected. Unfortunately, North Markian is very poorly documented and scientifically underexplored so that these characteristics are largely unknown. This corpus is being developed with the intent to address that gap and to provide a basis for the study of North Markian with modern methods of corpus linguistics, digital lexicography and computational linguistics.

For more information and source files, please visit the Git repository.