Acknowledgements

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The NECTE project is fundamentally indebted to the researchers who created the primary materials on which it is based: Anthea Fraser-Gupta, Val Jones, John Local, Vince McNeaney, Graham Nixon, John Pellowe, and Barbara Strang of the Tyneside Linguistic Survey, and Gerry Docherty, Paul Foulkes, Jim Milroy, and Lesley Milroy of the Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English project. Barbara Strang and John Pellowe have long since passed away, but the rest of the original TLS team have offered patient and expert guidance without which it would have been impossible to make adequate sense of the TLS materials stored at Newcastle University; we are particularly obliged to John Local for recovering material of which we were unaware at the NECTE project's inception, and to John Kirk for providing data that we thought was lost. Likewise, the PVC researchers have offered invaluable advice and support since the days when the idea of NECTE was first mooted.

We gratefully acknowledge the research assistants whose work and care over the years with archiving, cataloguing, copy-editing, proof-reading, and transcription has made a significant contribution to the finished product and, in many cases, saved our bacon when we were at full stretch: Katherine Appleby, Nigel Ball, Alice Birkett, Zoë Bremner, Lourdes Burbano-Elizondo, Joanna Cram, Alison Furness, Tina Fry, Olwyn Hocking, Amy Kendrick, Janet Lamb, Erika Lockwood, Adam Mearns and Pauline Pimblott.

Literally indispensable were Jonathan Marshall of the University of Gloucestershire (UK), who oversaw the digitization and restoration of the analog TLS recordings, and Paul Rayson, Nick Smith, and the CLAWS team at UCREL (University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language) , University of Lancaster (UK) for their efficiency in applying the CLAWS part-of-speech tagger to our highly non-standard English corpus, and for their patience in coping with our emergencies.

We are also much obliged to the individual scholars, project teams and conference participants who generously gave their time to help solve our problems concerning the compilation of the corpus, and who have outlined so clearly the ways in which value could be added to the resource. These include: (i) Adrian Beard, Ylva Berglund, Mary Bucholtz, Lou Burnard, Jenny Cheshire, Gerard Corsane, David Denison, Jean-Louis Duchat, Alastair Dunning, Philip Durkin, Barbara Fennell, Mike Fraser, Marc Fryd, Ray Hickey, Barbara Johnstone, Paul Kerswill, John X. Kelly, Tony Kroch, Carmen Llamas, Ron Macaulay, Brian MacWhinney, Christian Mair, April McMahon, Jim Miller, Helen Lawrence, Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, Bartolemiej Plichta, Shana Poplack, Jonathan Robinson, Geoff Sampson, Catherine Sangster, Graham Shorrocks, Greg Simpson, Jen Smith, Jane Stuart-Smith, Sali Tagliamonte, Clive Upton, Dom Watt, John Widdowson, Walt Wolfram and Malcah Yaeger-Dror; (ii) Principal investigators and project teams of: the AHRC Centres for North East England History/Irish and Scottish Studies; the American Linguistic Atlas; the Corpus of Early English Correspondence; the Endangered Languages Documentation Project; the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus; the International Corpus of English-Ireland; the Institute for Historical Dialectology, University of Edinburgh; the Language Interaction in Plurilingual and Plurilectal Speakers Group; Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale; the Linguistic and Cultural Heritage Electronic Network; the Nuuchahnulth Grammar Corpus; the Origins of New Zealand English Corpus; the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English; the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech; the Syntactic Atlas of Dutch Dialects; Talkbank; the York-Toronto-Helsinki Corpus of Old English Prose.

We gratefully acknowledge the infrastructural support provided in the various phases of NECTE by Central Services and the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics at Newcastle University, and wish in particular to thank Rowena Bryson and Rob Walton for their logistical support. Thanks also to the Newcastle University Institute of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities and Palgrave Macmillan for financial contributions towards production of the books associated with the project.

NECTE would also like to acknowledge the community support it has received from various local groups willing to act as promoters and gatekeepers of the resource. These include: Peter Arnold and Kim Bibby-Wilson of the Northumbrian Language Society; Jo Bath of the North East Oral History Mapping Coordinator at the Beamish Museum, Lynn Coulthard of the Byker Community Education Project; Iain Elliott of Canford Audio, Anne Finlay of the Hepscott Heritage Group, and Bill Griffiths of the Durham and Tyneside Dialect Group.

Credits for the project poster on the home page go, with thanks, to John Marshall and Dave Hewitt for the photos, and to Melanie Birch for the graphic design.

Last, but of course not least, we are deeply indebted to those who originally agreed to participate in the TLS and PVC projects, without whom there would have been no resource to enhance.