The participatory vernacular web and regional dialect grammar MICHAEL PEARCE A new account of pronouns in North East England Introduction English dialects demonstrate considerable vari- ation in their pronominal systems (see for example Trudgill & Chambers, 1991 and Hernández, 2011). In England, pronouns in the north east of the country – the urban areas of Tyne and Wear and Teesside and the counties of Durham and Northumberland (hereafter NEE) – are often differ- ent from those found in Standard English (SE). The most extensive modern accounts of NEE pronouns are Beal (1993) and Beal, Burbano–Elizondo and Llamas (2012), but because they appear in chapters dealing with a wide range of morphosyntactic topics, the coverage is necessarily brief. This art- icle is able to offer a more detailed overview of the morphology of NEE pronouns, based on a size- able naturalistic corpus of vernacular writing. The corpus is Ready to Go (RTG), an online forum for people with an interest in Sunderland A.F.C., a football club with a fanbase centred on a city on the North Sea littoral at the heart of the region. It is a written corpus, making it an unusual data-set in the study of regional non-standard mor- phosyntax. While ‘the research community is not exactly drowning’ in corpora that sample regional dialects (Szmrecsanyi & Anderwald, 2018: 303), those that do exist consist mainly of orthographic transcriptions of interviews with informants. In some cases, such as the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE), these inter- views were carried out specifically for linguistic research; in others they have been co-opted for research after being recorded for other purposes (e.g. the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects is mainly made up of local history interviews). This focus on spoken rather than written language in corpus-based dialectology is unsurprising, given that audio recordings allow access to phonology, and also because the naturally occurring, spontaneous, unselfconscious, everyday speech of folk in their locally based communities has conven- tionally been seen as the ‘holy grail’ of the sociolin- guistic enterprise (Holmes & Wilson, 2017: 268). Certainly, there has been a bias against regarding writing as truly vernacular, because the acquisition of literacy has generally meant literacy in Standard English. In the UK at least, the Standard Language Ideology exerts its strongest influence at the level of morphosyntax, so when people write they typically use what they believe to be standard grammar. Should written text therefore be dis- counted as a source of non-standard forms? While in the past writing might have been constrained by proximity to the standard, in the era of Web 2.0 con- temporary forms of writing online show ‘a relative lack of institutional regulation’ resulting in a prolif- eration of ‘spoken-like and vernacular features, traces of spontaneous production, innovative spel- ling choices’, and so on (Androutsopoulos, 2010: 209). On the vernacular participatory web (Howard, 2008; Androutsopoulos, 2010) sites such as RTG are socio-pragmatically complex arenas of argument, anecdote, banter and debate, in which MICHAEL PEARCE is a Senior Lecturer in English language at the University of Sunderland. Before moving to North East England, he was a lecturer in the School of English at the University of Leeds. His work on the language and culture of Northumbria has been published in journals such as English Studies and Journal of English Linguistics, as well as English Today. Email: mike.pearce@sunderland.ac.uk doi:10.1017/S0266078420000243 English Today page 1 of 10 (2020). Printed in the United Kingdom © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press 1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078420000243 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.32.46.11, on 30 Jul 2020 at 14:48:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at