The Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS) corpus

Period: 1960s-1970s

Interview details: 37 interviews. Total word count = 229,909. Total audio length = 22 hours 53 minutes 55 seconds (+7 additional phonetic transcription files relating to the Newcastle interviews).

The TLS project team: Joan Beal, Anthea Fraser Gupta, Val Jones, John Local, Vince McNeany, Graham Nixon, John Pellowe and Barbara Strang.

To judge from the project papers and public output of the Tyneside Linguistic Survey, its main aim was to determine whether systematic phonetic variation among Tyneside speakers could be significantly correlated with their social characteristics.

To this end a methodology was developed that was radical at the time and remains so today: in contrast to the then-universal and still-dominant theory driven approach, where social and linguistic factors are selected by the analyst on the basis of some combination of an independently-specified theoretical framework, existing case studies, and personal experience of the domain of enquiry, the TLS project proposed a fundamentally empirical approach in which salient factors are extracted from the data itself and then serve as the basis for model construction.

The aims and methodology of the TLS project are described in Strang (1968), Pellowe et al. (1972), Pellowe & Jones (1978) and Jones-Sargent (1983).

To realize this research aim, the TLS team created a corpus of spoken Tyneside English. It consisted of the following components:

• A collection of one-to-one interviews lasting an average of around 40 minutes, with Tyneside speakers who were randomly selected from the electoral register (the TLS interviewer briefly refers to this process at the beginning of two interviews, decten1tlsg23 and decten1tlsg27).

• The interviews were carried out in the informants' homes, and, to direct the conversations, informants were asked to talk about aspects of their lives such as the different places they had lived and jobs they had done, and encouraged to share their opinions on issues such as education and politics, and their attitudes to the local dialect.

• At the end of each interview, the informants were asked for judgements on constructions containing vernacular morphosyntax, and whether they knew or used a range of traditional dialect words. These interviews were recorded onto analog reel-to-reel tape, the standard audio recording technology of the time.
• Social data for each speaker.
• Orthographic and phonetic transcriptions of the first ten minutes or so of the interviews. An interview transcription consisted of a set of 200 or so index cards in which each card contained a representation of a brief segment of audio in Standard English orthography, a corresponding phonetic transcription of the audio segment, and some associated grammatical, prosodic, and phonological information.
• Digital electronic text files containing the phonetic transcriptions from the index cards.
• Digital electronic text files containing encoded social data for each speaker.

These components are fully described in Jones-Sargent (1983).

When the material from this period was rescued and converted into a digital format as part of the NECTE project, components relating to 114 TLS interviews were identified. Of these, only 37 were found to constitute a full set of the audio recording, transcriptions and social data. These 37 are included in DECTE, and are listed in Table 1.

Table 2 summarizes the social data associated with these speakers.

In addition to the above 37 interviews, all of which involve residents of Gateshead, the TLS component of DECTE includes phonetic transcriptions and informant social data files for a further seven interviews collected in Newcastle.

Since there is no surviving audio file or text transcription for these interviews, the information relating to them is summarized separately in the Table 3 below.

The TLS project analysis and results were described in Jones-Sargent (1983) and Jones (1985).

Thereafter, work on the TLS corpus languished. The audio tapes and index card sets were stored in the Department of English Language (now part of SELLL, the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics) at Newcastle University. In addition, John Local, one of the TLS researchers, deposited 6 audio recordings with the British Library Sound Archive, and the electronic files were lodged with the Oxford Text Archive.

In 1994-1995, Joan Beal (then a lecturer in SELLL) secured funding from the Catherine Cookson Foundation in order to: (1) salvage the by then rapidly deteriorating audio tapes by re-recording them onto cassette tape, (2) catalogue them, and (3) archive the tapes, index card sets, and documentation associated with the TLS project in a new Catherine Cookson Archive of Northumbrian Dialect at the University of Newcastle.

In 2001-2005, the TLS materials in the Catherine Cookson Archive and the Oxford Text Archive were incorporated into the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE).