Documentation

DECTE is a collection of text transcriptions and audio files of interviews with a wide variety of people from the North East of England dating back to the early 1970s.

As well as capturing the language and dialect of the region, and the ways in which it has changed through the years, the interviews also offer an insight into the lives and opinions of local people over the last five decades.

We have chosen the term 'diachronic' for the corpus not only in reference to the span of time across which the interviews have been and continue to be collected, but also as a reflection of the even greater span covered in terms of the lifetimes of the people who have been interviewed, encompassing as this does almost a century from 1895, when the oldest speaker from the 1971 recordings was born (decten1tlsg06a), to 1993, when the youngest speaker in the most recent set of interviews was born (decten2y10i018b).

1. Overview

2. Components

• Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS)
• Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC)
• NECTE2

3. Structure

• Content representation
• Content alignment
• Corpus structure