1 THE NEWCASTLE ELECTRONIC CORPUS OF TYNESIDE ENGLISH: FUTUREPROOFING A NEGLECTED LOCAL RESOURCE WILL ALLEN, JOAN BEAL, KAREN CORRIGAN, WARREN MAGUIRE and HERMANN MOISL Joan Beal Sheffield University UK j.c.beal@shef.ac.uk Paper Presented at the Forum UNESCO University and Heritage 10th International Seminar “Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century” NewcastleuponTyne, 1116 April 2005 Revised: July 2006 1: The NECTE project i UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage includes in its definition of the latter ‘oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage’. The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE) is a project devoted to the preservation of materials relating to the linguistic and cultural heritage of Tyneside. The NECTE project: 1. Preserves interviews with Tyneside people of the late 1960s and the early 1990s that provide fascinating insights not only into how Tynesiders spoke at those times, but also into their lives and attitudes. 2. Uses the most uptodate information technology to provide ready access to this material on the Web, and to ensure that it will not be lost to future generations The NECTE project amalgamates two separate collections of recorded speech. One of these collections was made in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS) project, based in the Department of English Language at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the other collection was made in 1994 as part of the Phonological Variation and Change (PVC) project based in the same university’s Department of Speech. The Tyneside Linguistic Survey was an ambitious and groundbreaking project, in many ways ahead of its time (see Strang et. al. 1968, Pellowe et. al. 1972). The key personnel included the late Professor Barbara Strang and John Pellowe; Vince McNeany, a locallyborn mature student who conducted all the interviews and transcribed them phonetically; Val Jones, who carried out the computational analysis; Joan Beal, Anthea Fraser Shields (now Gupta) and John Local, who worked as graduate students on related projects, and Graham Nixon. The aims and methods of the TLS were: • Theoretically, in setting out to gain scientific understanding of Tyneside English by extracting it from actual usage rather than interpreting it in terms of theoretical preconceptions;