The aim of the NECTE project was to enhance, improve access to, and promote re-use of two pre-existing corpora by amalgamating them into a single, Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)-conformant electronic corpus. The pre-existing corpora on which NECTE is based were both collected in the Tyneside region of North-East England, which is centred on Newcastle upon Tyne on the northern side of the river Tyne and Gateshead on the southern. The more recent of the two was created between 1991 and 1994 by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC) project (R000234892) undertaken by Gerard Docherty, James Milroy, Lesley Milroy (Principal Investigator) and associates, all of the University of Newcastle, and the earlier in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC; now ESRC)-funded Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS), conducted Barbara Strang (Principal Investigator), John Pellowe, and associates, all again of Newcastle University.

Copyright for the TLS and PVC materials rests with the data controllers (principal and co-investigators) who originally produced them, as detailed above. Copyright for the NECTE amalgamation of TLS and PVC is retained by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

The NECTE project's procedures for creation and dissemination of its corpus comply with the United Kingdom's Data Protection Act of 1998. For further details see Appendix 4: Compliance Statement of NECTE (The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English) with the United Kingdom Data Protection Act 1998.

This website gives an overview of the NECTE project by, firstly, describing the TLS and PVC corpora on which it is based, and then going on to a detailed account of what NECTE did with them.