In community-based linguistics, community members become involved in the analysis of their own language. This insider perspective can radically increase the speed and accuracy of phonological analysis, e.g. providing rapid identification of phonemic contrasts. However, due to the nature of these community-based sessions, much of the phonetic data is left undocumented. Rather than going back to traditional fieldwork, this paper argues that corpus phonetics can be applied to recordings of the community-based analysis sessions. As a first step in this direction, cross-language forced alignment is applied to the type of data generated by a community-based session in the Nikyob language of Nigeria. The alignments are accurate and suggest that corpus phonetics could complement community-based linguistics giving community members a powerful tool to analyse their own language.
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