Identity area
Type of entity
Corporate body
Authorized form of name
Survey of Vancouver English
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1976-1984
History
The Survey of Vancouver English (SVEN) was a multi-year project conducted by Department of Linguistics Professor Robert J. Gregg. A pilot survey from 1976 to 1978 preceded and was included in SVEN. SVEN ran from 1978 to 1984, and a final report was dispatched to Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. SVEN was an urban dialect survey of Vancouver-born residents seeking data concerning systematic sociolinguistic variables, such as phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Both the Pilot Survey and SVEN began with questionnaires. The SVEN questionnaire, a modified form of the Pilot Questionnaire, was intricately structured and had over 1000 questions. Three hundred individuals were included in the final study, 60 of which were part of the initial Pilot Survey. The interview process took two years and resulted in 496 audiotapes that were subsequently transcribed. The transcription took over two years and resulted in 300 booklets, one for each interviewee. Data resulting from the surveys and data from similar studies informed the researchers