Swedish Drama Dialogue

Swedish Drama Dialogue is a corpus of Swedish drama dialogue from the period 1730–1950, consisting of 34 complete plays. In 1998, teachers and researchers at the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University initiated the project Svensk dramadialog över tre sekler (’Swedish Drama Dialogue over Three Centuries’). The project was funded by the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University and the former Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSFR). The principal investigator was Mats Thelander; other participants from the outset included Görel Bergman Claeson, Ulla Börestam, Ulla Melander Marttala, Siv Strömquist, Gun Widmark, and Carin Östman. The digitisation and encoding of the dramas were carried out by Kristina Ohlander at the department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University. The project is presented in research reports Svensk dramadialog (’Swedish Drama Dialogue’) no. 1 (Melander Marttala & Östman 2000) and no. 2 (Melander Marttala & Strömquist 2001). A substantial number of focused studies based on the project have since been conducted and published in later reports, articles, and anthologies by both project members and other researchers within and beyond Uppsala. The material originally consisted of 45 complete Swedish plays dating from 1730 to the late 1990s, divided into dialogue and metatext. The plays were selected with diachronic comparability in mind and, as far as possible, comprised original Swedish plays for adult audiences that had been performed and whose authorship could be clearly identified. The selection aimed to reflect natural language use for each period; consequently, contemporary plays were prioritised and verse drama was largely avoided. At a later stage (after 2009), a subset of the material was annotated and processed for reuse in the corpus English and Swedish Drama Dialogue 1725–1950 (ESDD). This corpus comprised 15 English and 15 Swedish plays and was a collaborative project between the Department of Scandinavian Languages and the Department of English at Uppsala University. Work on ESDD was carried out by Linnéa Anglemark, Merja Kytö, Ulla Melander Marttala, and Sofia Gustafson Capcová, with support from the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University. The remaining plays have been processed by Astrid Berntsson Ingelstam with support from Språkbanken CLARIN, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2025–2028; grant no. 2023-00161) in collaboration with the ten participating universities and government agencies.