Dr. Marwan Jarrah
Principal Investigator. Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics
Welcome to the Child Language Corpus of Jordanian Arabic (JA)—the first large-scale, systematically compiled linguistic resource dedicated to documenting the spoken language of typically developing children in Jordan. This corpus represents a foundational step in Arabic language acquisition research, offering a rich and unprecedented dataset of natural child speech across regional, age, and gender lines. Spanning a total of approximately 500,000 words, this corpus is based on over 500 recorded interviews with children aged 2 years and 6 months to 12 years. These interactions capture a diverse spectrum of everyday, spontaneous language use, reflecting the authentic voices of Jordanian children across urban, rural, and Bedouin communities. The corpus offers an inclusive and highly representative view of vernacular Jordanian Arabic (JA) in real-life contexts.