The sections below describe the background of the Talk of the Toon archive and the interviews it contains, including summaries of the speakers' background details (age, gender, area of residence, occupation and education). For an index list of all of the interviews in the archive, see the Interview Index page.

Scroll down or click one of the section links below:

• Introduction
• Interviews: Summary
• Interviews from the 1960s-1970s
• Interviews from the 1990s
• Interviews from the 2000s

If you have any comments, suggestions or queries about The Talk of the Toon, you can send us a message using our Feedback Form. New interviews are collected for the archive each year - you can volunteer to participate in one of these interviews by filling in the form here.

Introduction

The Talk of the Toon archive contains text transcriptions and audio files of interviews with a wide variety of people from the North East of England, dating back to the late 1960s. 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.

The Themes page allows you to search the interviews on the basis of seventeen 'topics of conversation' (such as family & relationships, education, and holidays). You can filter your results according to the gender or age of the speakers, or the time period of the interviews. These theme searches will also pick out relevant items from the archive's collection of pictures and video clips.

Alternatively, you can search all of the interviews for a particular word or phrase, using the Word Search panel on the Homepage or by visiting the Search page.

You can also choose to focus on the full linked text and audio recording of a specific interview. The Interview Index page lists all of the available interviews. Clicking on the interview or informant codes in any of the tables below will also take you to the relevant text/audio interface page.

As well as the interviews, pictures and video clips, The Talk of the Toon website contains resources for school teachers and students, an Introduction to North East Dialects, interactive multiple choice quizzes, and links to other websites that relate both to the study of language in general, and to other collections of interviews like our own.

You can access each of these sections by following the relevant links from the Homepage or the menu bar at the top and bottom of each page.

Interviews: Summary

In total, the archive currently contains 98 interviews, recording 158 speakers (86 women and 72 men) in 798,314 words of text and 71 hours 11 minutes and 29 seconds of audio. The interviews come from three different research projects carried out at Newcastle University in the 1960s-1970s, the 1990s and the 2000s. The table below summarizes the contents of each of these three interview sets.

The remaining sections on this page contain brief descriptions of each of these three interview sets and the projects that produced them. The tables provide summaries of the speakers' background details (age, gender, area of residence, occupation and education) and general interview statistics (length of the recordings in terms of both audio duration and transcription word counts).

Interviews from the 1960s-1970s

There are 37 interviews from this period included in the Talk of the Toon archive. They were recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as part of the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS). The TLS was designed to investigate possible links between the social characteristics of local residents and features of their accents. This involved conducting one-to-one interviews, lasting an average of around 40 minutes, with Tyneside speakers who were selected from the electoral register (the TLS interviewer briefly refers to this process at the beginning of two interviews, TLSG23 and TLSG27). The interviews were carried out in the informants' homes. 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. As you can hear in many of the interviews contained in the archive, the project's focus on accent and dialect becomes more obvious when the informants are asked to read out a list of words supplied by the interviewer, and to say whether they know or use words and phrases that he in turn reads out to them.

The TLS interviews were stored in the form of analogue reel-to-reel audio recordings, transcriptions of the first ten minutes or so of the recordings (including phonetic transcriptions that recorded characteristics of the speaker's accent) and detailed social data files. When the material from this period was rescued and converted into a digital format as part of the NECTE project (see below), components relating to 114 TLS interviews were identified. Of these, only the 37 currently included in the archive were found to consist of a full set of the audio recording, transcriptions and social data.

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

Interview Summary:
37 interviews. Total word count = 229,909. Total audio length = 22 hours 53 minutes 55 seconds.

Informant Summary:
Informant Codes are based on the Interview Codes. Where an interview also records casual contributions from a secondary informant, the primary informant is identified with the addition of 'a' at the end of their code, e.g. TLSG02a.

37 informants (20 women and 17 men).

Interviews from the 1990s

The Talk of the Toon archive contains 18 interviews from the 1990s. These were recorded around 1994 as part of the Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC) project. Like the Tyneside Linguistic Survey of the 1960s and 1970s, the PVC project was a study of local accent features.

The 18 interviews collected by the PVC project team consist of conversations between two friends or relatives of similar age and social background. One of the informants is recorded in two separate interviews (PVC06 and PVC08). In PVC06, she is recorded with her brother, while in PVC08 she is talking with a female friend. It is apparent that some of the other informants from different interviews also know each other. The informants were free to discuss any topic that they chose. Unlike the TLS interviews, the PVC interviewer plays little or no part in most of the interviews, though she does occasionally ask questions or suggest new topics when the conversation dries up (e.g. PVC01 and PVC06) or when one of the informants has to leave early (PVC17). The interviewer also seems to play a slightly more active part in the two recordings that involve married couples (PVC04 and PVC05).

As in the TLS, the project's focus on features of accent is reflected in the word list that most of the informants are asked to read out at the end of the interviews. Only selective phonetic transcriptions of words of interest were produced at the time of the project. The recordings were made on digital audio tape and average around 60 minutes in length. Most of the interviews take place in informants' homes, though at least four of them (PVC15, PVC16, PVC17 and PVC18) were evidently recorded at Rutherford School, in Fenham, Newcastle (just before it was renamed Westgate Community College). The first three of these involve pairs of students, and the last one records a pair of dinner ladies.

The PVC Project Team:
Gerry Docherty, Paul Foulkes, Jim Milroy, Lesley Milroy, Penny Oxley, David Walshaw and Dominic Watt.

Interview Summary:
18 interviews. Total word count = 208,295. Total audio length = 17 hours 34 minutes 25 seconds.

Informant Summary:
Each interview recorded two primary informants. Their Informant Codes consist of the relevant Interview Code plus 'a' or 'b'.

Informant PVC06a also participated in interview PVC08 (as informant PVC08a). In interview PVC06, she is recorded in conversation with her brother. In PVC08 she is talking with a female friend.

35 informants (18 women and 17 men).

Interviews from the 2000s

Between 2000 and 2005, the 55 interviews described above from the 1960s-1970s and the 1990s were combined to create the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE). The aim of the NECTE project was to preserve all of the available TLS and PVC material in the form of a single enhanced electronic resource. This involved converting the original analogue recordings from the 1960s-1970s into an appropriate digital format, and creating aligned transcription files of both sets of interviews that conformed to established standards for the digital representation of texts - namely, the guidelines set out by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This combined corpus of interviews was then made available online to researchers and to the wider public.

The NECTE Project Team:
Will Allen, Joan Beal, Karen Corrigan, Warren Maguire and Hermann Moisl.

The Talk of the Toon archive currently includes 43 interviews from this period.

From 2007, new sets of interviews with a variety of local informants from a range of social backgrounds have been collected annually by students and researchers at Newcastle University. These form the NECTE2 collection. Like those from the 1990s, the new interviews each record 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 earlier sets of interviews represented in the archive, which concentrated exclusively on the Newcastle/Gateshead region of Tyneside, the geographical area 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 Informant Summary table below.

Beginning in 2010, the audio recordings and transcriptions from this NECTE2 set have been reformatted to conform to the same standards that were applied to the earlier material during the NECTE project described above. In this updated form, they have been combined with the interviews from the 1960s-1970s and 1990s to create the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE). In linguistics, 'diachronic' is a term that indicates a focus on the way that the features of a language, and the manner in which it is used by its speakers, develop and change over time. The term applies to the DECTE interviews included in the Talk of the Toon archive for two reasons. Firstly, it reflects the fact that the interviews have been recorded in three periods stretching back through five decades into the late 1960s. Secondly, it reflects 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 in the 1960s-1970s set was born (informant TLSG06a), to 1993, when the youngest speaker in the most recent set of interviews was born (informant Y10i018b).

The DECTE Project Team:
Isabelle Buchstaller, Karen Corrigan, Adam Mearns and Hermann Moisl.

Interview Summary:
43 interviews. Total word count = 360,110. Total audio length = 30 hours 43 minutes 9 seconds.

Informant Summary:
Each interview recorded two primary informants. Their Informant Codes consist of the relevant Interview Code plus 'a' or 'b'.

86 informants (48 women and 38 men).

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Contact: decte@ncl.ac.uk | Feedback Form | Get Involved

Banner Photo Credits.
Home Page: Tyne Bridges and the Sage (Ben Christian 2010, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0); Angel of the North (Ian Robertson 2008, CC BY-NC 2.0).
Content Pages: Angel of the North (James Grey 2007, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0); The Sage (Hawkins 2008, CC BY 2.0);
The Tyne Bride (Richard White 2010, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); Millennium Bridge (Ben Christian 2010, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Copyright Notice.
Except where sources and copyright holders are otherwise indicated on the website, the contents of this website are copyrighted in their entirety by Karen Corrigan (Principal Investigator of The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English, the AHRC-funded DEDEFI project which created The Talk of the Toon).
Permission from copyright holders must be obtained before any part of The Talk of the Toon is reproduced in any form. Violations of copyright restrictions may result in legal liability.

Reference Details.
(a) The Talk of the Toon.
Corrigan, Karen P., Isabelle Buchstaller, Adam Mearns and Hermann Moisl (2012-) The Talk of the Toon. Newcastle University. http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon
(b) DECTE.
Corrigan, Karen P., Isabelle Buchstaller, Adam Mearns and Hermann Moisl (2012-) The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. Newcastle University. http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte

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