Acknowledgements

The DECTE project is of course indebted to the researchers who created the legacy materials that it incorporates:

• The recordings from the 1970s were collected as part of the Tyneside Linguistic Survey by Joan Beal, Anthea Fraser Gupta, Val Jones, John Local, Vince McNeany, Graham Nixon, John Pellowe and Barbara Strang.
• The 1990s recordings were gathered for the Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English project by Gerry Docherty, Paul Foulkes, Jim Milroy, Lesley Milroy, Penny Oxley, David Walshaw and Dominic Watt.
• Between 2001 and 2005, these two collections were digitized and amalgamated as the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English by Will Allen, Joan Beal, Karen Corrigan, Warren Maguire and Hermann Moisl. Full acknowledgements for that project can be found here.
• Since 2007, a great number of undergraduate and postgraduate students have recorded and transcribed interviews for the current stage of the corpus (NECTE2), as part of their studies in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University.

In creating The Talk of the Toon website, we have benefitted from working with our partners at Beamish, The Living Museum of the North and Newcastle's Discovery Museum, as well as colleagues at the Northern Region Film and Television Archive (which merged with the Yorkshire Film Archive in 2012, becoming the North East Film Archive) and the Headliners 'Taakin Heeds' project.

We gratefully acknowledge the expert guidance of the DECTE Advisory Board: Joan Beal (chair), Will Allen, Ben Anderson, Rachel Baron, Lucy Bemrose, Kim Bibby-Wilson, Gillian Robinson, Alison Ross, Sarah Rule, David Stewart and Kevin Watson.

We also owe a great deal to the sterling work of the project assistants who have undertaken a variety of tasks as the project has progressed: Joanne Bartlett, Claire Childs, Alexander Docherty, Kaye Dodds, Jean Price, Nick Roberts and Peter Wilson.

Lastly, but by no means least, we are deeply indebted to all those people of the North East who have agreed to be interviewed throughout the years.

Between October 2010 and January 2012, DECTE was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under the Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact (DEDEFI) scheme described here.