The NECTE2 corpus / DECTE

Period: 2007-ongoing

Interview Details: 44 interviews from 2007-2010 incorporated into DECTE. Total word count = 366,062. Total audio length = 31 hours 17 minutes 23 seconds.
(For details of the larger NECTE2 archive, see the summary here.)

The DECTE Project Team (2010-2012): Isabelle Buchstaller, Karen Corrigan, Adam Mearns, Hermann Moisl.

NECTE2 is a monitor corpus that consists of dyadic sociolinguistic interviews with speakers from across the North East of England that have been collected since 2007.

The first phase of this project was funded between 2009-2010 by an award for research collaboration and infrastructure initiatives from the university's Centre for Research in Language and Linguistic Sciences. The holders of the award were Isabelle Buchstaller, Karen Corrigan, Gerry Docherty and Ghada Khattab.

As a corpus-building initiative, NECTE2 was designed as a follow-up to the NECTE project, which had digitized and amalgamated the two pre-existing legacy corpora described elsewhere on this site: the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS) and the Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC) corpus. The website associated with this early stage of the NECTE2 project is archived here.

The second phase of the project was funded by an award made to Isabelle Buchstaller, Karen Corrigan and Hermann Moisl from the AHRC's Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact (DEDEFI) scheme. This phase focused on the creation of the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE), the present research website and the public-facing Talk of the Toon website.

The creation of DECTE involved updating the existing NECTE TEI-P4 XML files, so that they conformed to the P5 guidelines that were released in 2007, and processing a selection of interviews from NECTE2 to add to these existing files, where processing entails revising and anonymizing the transcriptions, time-aligning the text and the audio, and converting the resulting transcription files into TEI-conformant XML.

With the Talk of the Toon website, the aim has been to present the resulting corpus as part of an interactive, multimedia site that appeals to a wide range of users, from those in schools and the heritage sector to the general public.

Since 2007, an average of seventy NECTE2 interviews have been recorded annually by undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University, as part of a learning and teaching initiative that encompasses courses in areas such as linguistic variation and change, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. The interview material consists of digital audio recordings, text transcriptions and records of informant social details.

Like those of the PVC, each NECTE2 interview records two informants who are usually friends or relatives and therefore similar in age or social background, or both. The conversations generally last from 30 to 70 minutes and cover a wide range of topics, with different degrees of participation and direction from the different student interviewers involved.

Unlike the TLS and PVC interviews, which concentrated exclusively on the Newcastle and Gateshead areas of Tyneside, the geographical region covered by the project has now been extended to include speakers from other parts of the North East of England, as can be seen from the region/residence information recorded in Table 2 below.

The selection of NECTE2 interviews that have so far been incorporated into DECTE (i.e. the TEI-conformant XML corpus) is shown in Table 1, with details of the corresponding informants in Tables 2 and 3. A summary of the full archive of NECTE2 interviews can be found here.

Each interview has two primary informants. These are listed in Table 2 as a and b together with associated social data.

The age and speaker sex information in Table 2 is summarized in Table 3.