The SPAN project aims at creating an annotated corpus of spoken Maltese.

The project builds on an earlier project, MalToBI, designed to construct a first structured corpus of spoken Maltese. The corpus resulting from the MalToBI project consists of data from 16 speakers of standard Maltese (balanced in terms of age, sex and educational background) and contains material in four different speech styles, ranging from more formal sentence and text reading, through to more informal, quasi-conversational speech. which is being annotated orthographically.

Work has just started on developing standards for the annotation of intonation from data in the corpus. The main aims of the project are to develop preliminary annotation standards for work with corpora of spoken Maltese and to use these standards in the annotation of data from the available corpus. The annotated corpus will constitute a structured resource for continuing research on the phonetics and phonology of Maltese; it is also expected to be useful to those working on developing speech engineering tools such as high quality Text-to-Speech systems for Maltese.

The project is hosted by the Institute of Linguistics and funded through the Research Fund of the University of Malta. An application for a second year of funding for the project was submitted in June 2007.